Image via Complex Original
30 years ago, simply being a tattooer was radical; tattooing was still outlawed in many American cities, and tattoo shops were underground hideouts that evaded regulation by necessity. Now, estimates claim that 23 percent of the American population has at least one tattoo, and Instagram has made it exceptionally easy for tattoo artists to share their work with large audiences.
Tattooing has always been a global practice, but the recent growth of the field and the sheer number of people with technical skills have resulted in radical experimentation among those who want to be beyond good; they want to be exceptional. Pushed by the constant evolution of the medium, from the underground to the mainstream, tattooers have increasingly tried to carve out an individual “style” so that customers and clients will travel across countries and continents for an appointment.
The best of them have redefined the medium by putting pressure on rhetorical boundaries that have historically separated tattooing from art or craft. Some have traveled deeper into re-interpreting the cultural roots of tattooing, while others have innovated aesthetically, eschewing some of the visual trademarks that have defined the medium for centuries.
The following 10 tattoo artists, of all ages and nationalities, are some of the innovators breaking the rules and pushing the boundaries of the medium.
Amanda Wachob
Shop: Private studio in Brooklyn
Inspired by the Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann, Amanda Wachob first began tattooing her now-famous “brushstrokes” as an experiment. As she told The New York Times in 2011, “If [Hoffman] were going to make an abstract painting that wasn’t on a rectangle, but perhaps on an organic form like an arm, what would the shapes look like?”
Completely eliminating the black outline that has traditionally dominated tattoo imagery, her ultra-realistic brushstrokes and “watercolor-style” forms have become a trademark. Although her outline-free style is polarizing among tattooers, she insists that the thick outline is simply one of tattooing’s “old tenets.” People have caught on; she is almost impossible to get an appointment with, and instead of tattooing full-time, she has continued to rethink how to bridge the gap between fine art and tattooing through her artwork. As she told Needles and Sins in 2009, “I see [tattooing] as a tool. In the same way that a paintbrush can be used to paint the exterior of a house, it can also be used to apply paint to a canvas.”
Her recent work has included gestural canvasses, marked with a tattoo machine, depictions of tattooed skin through macro-photography, and tattoos on fruit skins. Through her work, she has been experimenting with the potential of tattooing as a medium, rather than as an adornment, and whether it can remain a viable practice when removed from the body.
Roxx
Shop: 2Spirit Tattoo in San Francisco
Beginning her career in the 1980s as a hand-poker on the streets of London, Roxx has grown into one of the most progressive and sought-after tattooers in the world. Her simple and geometric blackwork tattoos refuse to treat the body as a canvas for an image, but rather as a free-flowing form. Her unparalleled attention to anatomy results in organic tattoos that blend into the body’s form, custom designed for the individual musculature and anatomy of each wearer. Often, a single tattoo will span multiple limbs–arms and chest, arms and back, entire legs–as if permeating the body.
Despite the precision of her tattoos, Roxx does not use stencils. To create her tattoos, Roxx performs in-depth consultations with each client, taking photographs of his or her body, later drawing on a tattoo freehand. “It’s all down to lines and forms and curves now, and the simplicity of how you put them together. It’s back to graphic design.” Her multifaceted inspirations–from tribal work to graphic design to street art–result in works that are not dateable. Instead, the profound delicacy of her lines, while immediately recognizable as Roxx tattoos, have a timeless beauty that will redefine the ways the tribal aesthetic is reinterpreted in the future.
Nikko Hurtado
Shop: Black Anchor Collective in Hesperia, Calif.
Although best known for his guest appearances on LA Ink and huge roster of celebrity clients, Nikko Hurtado is no doubt a master of the realistic portrait. His precise, full-color tattoos have set the standard for the type of detail and photographic fidelity attainable in the medium.
After practicing drawing for years with colored pencil but struggling with black and grey tattoos, he experienced his first epiphany as a young tattooer when approached to tattoo a painted portrait of Bela Lugosi. The color combinations and mixtures in paintings, he said, were easier for him to understand as an artist. Since then, he has become famous for tattooing faces directly from photographs, the amplified palette in his final tattoos emitting a lustrous sheen similar to glossy photo paper.
Like other realists, Hurtado does not tattoo outlines. The detailed, almost topographic linework of his pre-tattoo stencils instead ensures his unparalleled sense of depth, form, and crispness. Details, such as tiny, glistening sweat droplets on a 2013 portrait of Mike Tyson are created through the layering of pigments and multiple passes to build color gradually, akin to the process of oil painting, that really pull his tattoos together.
Joey Pang
Shop: Tattoo Temple in Hong Kong
Growing up in Hong Kong, Joey Pang always associated tattooing with a criminal lifestyle. As lifelong illustrator, she knew that she wanted to incorporate art into her career, so she dabbled as a makeup artist but ultimately became disappointed with the temporary nature of this “art.” At age 25, Pang had a revelation after traveling to New Zealand for the first time and catching her first glimpse of Maori tattoos. “In New Zealand, people respect tattoos. So that changed my understanding of tattooing; from the ‘Hong Kong gangster tattoo,’ I started thinking “I can use tattoo as a medium for drawing.”
Now, she is one of the only Calligraphic tattoo specialists in the world. The subtle black and grey gradients and traditional Chinese imagery in her tattoos almost fully resemble brush painting with ink. Instead of thinking of her works as tattoos per se, she considers her work “permanent body art” meant to enhance and transform an individual’s skin into fine art. Instead of reaching into the history of tattooing, Pang has completely departed from the traditional tattoo imagery of Hong Kong, instead borrowing from fine art traditions in an attempt to carve out a new Chinese tattoo history.
And Pang’s three-year waiting list and a reported hourly rate of $1,600 USD ensure that the only skin she touches is that of high-powered executives and celebrities–never the gangsters she abhors.
Sua Suluape Toetu'u, Aisea
Shop: Soul Signature Tattoo in Honolulu
Although many tattooers have fiddled with the imagery of tribal tattooing, Aisea Toetu’u is trying to reintroduce the actual practice of Polynesian tattooing to a wider audience. A native Hawaiian tattooer with Filipino ancestry, Toetu’u first came into contact with Maquesian tattooer Pooino Yorandi and anthropologist Tricia Allen at age 19. The two guided his career as a tattooer, and in 1997, Toetu’u began, with a small group of other Hawaiian artists, to piece together a “New Tribal” style that fused traditional Polynesian motifs and techniques with influences from Japanese tattooing and graffiti.
Toetu’u creates many of his tattoos with the traditional “tapping” method, and in the manner of a traditional tufunga (artist), refuses to take suggestions about design or placement for his traditional works. The results are beautiful, geometric tattoos, in which the hashed markings, resulting from the flat tapping device, can be seen through blackwork. His style has been influenced by extensive cross-media study with Tongan woodcut carvers and master tattooers like Su’a Sulu’ape Petelo. He has also been incredibly active in tattooing for cultural revitalization by helping other indigenous cultures–from Aztecs to Nigerian tribes–revive their traditional tattooing practices through tapping.
Shige
Shop: Yellow Blaze Tattoo Studio in Yokohama, Japan
Born in Hiroshima in 1970, Shigenori Iwasaki, better known as Shige, has been hailed by many as the founder of “new school” Japanese tattooing. A former Harley Davidson technician, he was initially drawn to tattooing through the colorful American-style tattoos he saw through his job. Instead of embarking on a multi-decade apprenticeship with a master tattooer, as is custom within Japanese tradition, Shige instead chose to travel and learn from international tattooing legends while, at first, practicing on his own body. He cites a three-month period in Switzerland with esteemed tattooer Filip Leu as a turning point, in which he became part of a community of tattooers outside of his native country, Japan.
As a result, his style is truly international. Deeply rooted in the history and study of Japanese tradition, Shige’s extra-large compositions, modeled shading, and bright colors are distinctly novel. Still, he makes all of his own needles and continues to heavily study the craft and history of Japanese tattooing. In a 2009 interview, he expressed, “For me, having an artisan spirit is more important than producing artistic designs. Since I didn’t and don’t belong to any school, I don’t stick to Japanese traditional tattoo styles...What I do is to have the tradition as the foundation and then to build it to create my original style.”
Dr. Lakra
Shop: Unknown
Although Jerónimo López Ramírez, aka Dr. Lakra, is widely considered a tattooer, he is most famous for his incorporation of the tattoo aesthetic in fine art. One of the first artists to bridge the gap between the “art world” and tattooing, Dr. Lakra’s work is even more distinctive for its celebration of a low-brow, macabre street style. Unlike other tattooers who have tried to emulate the aesthetic of “high” art in their tattoos, Dr. Lakra has shoved scratcher tattoos into the gallery.
Dr. Lakra began his career tattooing in Mexico City’s El Chopo street market in lieu of going to school. He and his friends would tattoo each other outdoors, disassembling cassette players and reassembling their motors with sewing needles into makeshift machines. And in the 1980s, when most Mexico City tattoos were gang-related, cops took notice. At the same time, however, he was fully integrating himself in the art world, joining renown artist Gabriel Orozco’s workshop. Then in 1993, he moved to Oakland, Calif., and became an informal apprentice of Don Ed Hardy.
Since moving back to Mexico and becoming more involved with the commercial market, Dr. Lakra’s mixed-media works have remained true to his street tattoo roots. Whether a baby doll adorned with “Japanese-style” phalluses, bogus characters, and stippled swastikas, or a hand figurine with crude, bold, Russian-prison style symbols, the found nature of his work retains a macabre, scary, and outsider aesthetic that will forever redefine the ways fine art appropriates tattoo culture.
Alex Binnie
Shop: Into You Tattoo in London
Alex Binnie, who has been tattooing actively since the late 1980s, is one of the original innovators of the “neo-tribal” movement. Binnie, along with a small group of European tattooers like Xed Lehead and Tomas Tomas, began incorporating bold, black line work, inspired by a mishmash of traditional tribal practices, into his work long before it was popularized through the now-often-regretted tribal armband trend of the ’90s.
His “tribal” tattoos, for the most part, eschew all color and traditional grey shading, instead using large expanses of blacked out skin and light stippling to create visual dynamism. Working with a machine rather than poking or tapping, Binnie continues to create large-scale geometric works that can often incorporate the wearer’s entire body.
A prolific artist outside the studio, Binnie has also become famous for his bold, graphic woodcut portraits of people with tattoos. These portraits, executed with only black ink, perfectly emphasize the bold, geometric nature of his tattoos.
Peter Aurisch
Shop: Nevada Johnny in Berlin
With bright, vivid colors and sharp, gestural lines, one cannot argue that Peter Aurisch’s work isn’t distinctive…or technically precise. His smooth gradients and color layering, the way he manipulates the tattoo machine to create both soft, wispy pencil-like lines and bold, black “marker” lines, certainly requires the utmost skill. And yet, his tattoos break almost every rule in the book. Instead of being static, strong, and bold, they seem almost sketched, tentative, and emphatically experimental.
Aurisch is part of a larger group of mostly European tattooers, including Xoïl and Yann Black, who all experiment with scratchy, graphic linework. All of them contrast the visceral, gestural feeling of the sketch with the slow, deliberate process of tattooing for unexpected results. While more traditional tattooers continue to debate whether more ephemeral-looking tattoos will stand the test of time or fade into unrecognizable blotches, Aurisch’s distinct type of “fine-art” style tattoo has continued to attract a tremendous following.
Jenna Bouma
Shop: Bouma travels around the world doing guest spots at different shops
Jenna Bouma’s tattoos always obey two rules: always black and always hand poked. Though Bouma is still in her early 20s, she has already begun carving out a distinctive style and practice. Most notably, Bouma refuses to use a machine and has begun to bring back a style of hand poking that drifts far from the both scratcher-style prison tattoos and shoddy, amateur “stick and pokes.” Instead, she fashions her own hand tools in the manner of Japanese masters and uses her tools to dictate her style.
Bouma has set a standard of restraint. Characterized by their extreme boldness and pared down to the minutest of details, her tattoos–inspired by old school Americana and prison motifs–sometimes look a bit wonky at first. Her shading often incorporates thicker stippling and harsher transitions than machine tattoos. This starkness, however, is intentional: her aesthetic, tools, and motifs all pay homage to tattooing’s underbelly past, while simultaneously carving out a new path for the future.