Sometimes, the road ahead is so straight and clear that you can see for miles. But the unintentional, off-beaten paths can also lead us exactly where we need to be.

Such was the case for White House native Bubba Underwood, owner of tattoo shop Artistic Behavior located in his hometown. Last month, Bubba was the second-place winner at the Nashville Tattoo Arts Festival, presented by Villain Arts.

Bubba began tattooing after a series of missteps left him incarcerated in 2010.

“I made some poor choices right after graduating from high school that landed me in prison for six years,” he explains. “Right after I got there, I made the decision to change my life, and since then, that’s what I’ve done.”

A lifelong artist, Bubba had excelled in art classes as a child as well as honors art classes as a teenager. While incarcerated, he began drawing postcards for his fellow prisoners to send home. Acting on the suggestion of a cellmate, Bubba took up tattooing and began honing his craft, utilizing makeshift tools crafted out of anything he could get his hands on in prison.

“You get real creative in there, so I had to make all of my tattoo machines and needles and inks,” he says. “I made a tattoo machine out of an electric brush motor, and the needle was made out of a spring from a Bic pen. You can heat it up and stretch it out to straighten it, then cut it and sharpen it.”

Ink was made with burned hair grease and by trapping black soot into a paper tower.

“You can mix it with shampoo to create ink,” Bubba says, while admitting wholeheartedly that prison ink probably isn’t the healthiest of options.

Today, 13 years after Bubba was initially incarcerated, he’s come a long way from his first tattoo, a set of initials he drew on his own knee.

Competing in the Nashville Tattoo Arts Festival against 300 tattoo artists from around the country, some of whom have been featured on the television show “Ink Masters,” Bubba’s design captured the judges’ attention, garnering him second place in the day-long competition. The tattoo Bubba chose to create wasn’t the one he originally intended to compete with; however, his business savvy, coupled with his ability to read people, led him to alter his design the night before the competition.

“Judges sometimes lean towards a certain style, so I knew I wanted to change my design the night before and add colors that really popped,” he explains. “I changed the design so that the style was also something between traditional and nontraditional … between old school and new school.”

As luck would have it, Bubba had a willing subject to tattoo during the competition — Tayler Underwood, his wife and staunchest supporter, was willing to add another tattoo to her collection.

In keeping with the rest of Bubba’s tale, the story of how he and Taylor met and fell in love is not only unconventional, but also something right out of a movie script.

“She was a jailer at the county jail I was locked up in,” Bubba recounts. “She was actually the person who put the handcuffs on me when I went to court, and after that, every time she came in, I would try to talk to her through the doors. I don't know why she chose to talk to me, but she did. After she quit that job, we began talking over the phone while I was in prison, and I’ve been talking to her ever since.”

After his release, Bubba spent several years working for a tattoo shop before deciding to open his own business in White House. Now in its second year, Artistic Behavior has been brimming with business since then, thanks to word of mouth and a burgeoning reputation for quality work.

“We have walk-ins, but we also have repeat clients who come back to get additional tattoos,” Bubba says.

It’s anticipated the additional notoriety achieved via the Nashville Tattoo Arts Festival will increase Artistic Behavior’s clientele exponentially.

As tales of redemption stories go, Bubba Underwood’s is an inspirational one that serves to remind us of one vital thought: We are not defined by our worst mistakes, only what we learn from them.