Image via Complex Original
Somewhere along the way tattoos became a thing for everyone from babies to grandmas, and things got a little watercolor-y and cute. The roots of tattooing lie in thick, black line work and bold, dynamic shading. Get it? Initially created to withstand the hot sun and manual labor, these bold black lines had a practical purpose: the bolder the line, the longer the tattoo would last. So, fine—tattoos are no longer just for sailors and bikers, but many of today’s best tattoo artists harken back to the craft’s past. Whether it’s a call-out to Chicano history or the roots of American punk, thick lines, bold shading, and tough images all reference the past while allowing today’s artists to break the rules and establish their own distinct styles. From blacked-out legs to pinup girls, here’s here’s a roundup of the tattooers doing it harder out there right now.
Apro Lee
Shop: Black Mark It (Seoul, South Korea)
Instagram:@apro_lee
Tattooing may still be illegal in South Korea, but that never stopped Apro Lee. Forced to hone his craft by watching YouTube videos, buying $10 needles off the black market, and apprenticing while abroad in Australia, the Seoul native tattoos around the world and from his underground “bunker” in Seoul. Yet, his work remains rooted in Korean history: bold, contorted Korean tigers, a traditional folk image, represent government bureaucracy, mocked by squawking magpies that evade them. Blast-over nooses, one sported by Lee himself, represent the tattooer’s survival and the will to fight against police crackdowns.
Jasmine Wright
Shop: Private studio (San Diego)
Instagram:@imbusy666
If placement is everything, this kitty takes the cake.But, as we pick up our dropped jaws and recover our senses, let’s not ignore the brilliant shading and crisp line work from this San Diego-based tattooer. Best known for her bright, playful lady heads and sweet cartoonish pet portraits, Wright holds her own when it comes to snarling eagles and blackwork blast-overs.
Mina Aoki
Shop: Fun City Tattoo (New York)
Instagram:@minaaoki
Mina Aoki was only 14 when she began working at New York’s iconic Daredevil and Fun City Tattoo shops as an after-school job. Spending her teen years going to shows on the Lower East Side and completing her tattoo apprenticeship, Aoki emerged with a style that combines the full-bosomed fantasy women from ’70s pornography with the sharp, black shapes of ’90s tribal tattoos. Although she completed her first tattoo only five years ago, her skills allow her to tackle everything from fine-line cigarette smoke to bright bold peonies, and her seemingly innate sense of what makes a good tattoo means that while she’s always pushing boundaries, she never missteps.
Max Kuhn
Shop: Nomadic (Reachable via text/email)
Instagram:@max_kuhn
A self-described “semi-legal,” “semi-retired” nomad, you can find Max Kuhn traveling across the USA, tattooing his bold, romantic Americana out of hotel rooms along the way. Then again, as he says, “tattooing is probably the tamest illicit activity happening in most hotels.” Rejecting the posturing and hierarchy of the traditional shop, Kuhn organizes much of his business through his cell phone and email, and while we wouldn’t normally recommend getting tattooed out of some guy’s hotel, Kuhn’s skills are apparent. Many of his tattoos—from hissing eagles to flags and roses to full back pieces of cowboys on horseback, riding off into the sunset—are drawn freehand, and the crudeness of his thick lines and bold shading makes us nostalgic for traditional Americana of old.
Fuzi Uvtpk
Shop: None
Instagram:@fuziuvtpk
In the mid-1990s, Fuzi Uvtpk founded the “ignorant style” on the streets of Paris. Consciously ignoring the standardized “rules” of graffiti, he wanted to create a “naive and pure” style without constraint. Now Fuzi travels the world, tattooing people (like Scarlet Johansson!) in subways stations and art galleries. His tattoos emulate that graffiti aesthetic, with jagged, uneven “brick” backgrounds and not a single bit of shading; if you look closely, you’ll see that his lines, while warped and curved, are completely solid.
Tamara Santibanez
Shop: Saved Tattoo (Brooklyn)
Instagram: @tamarasantibanez
Long nails, leather jackets, and gold hoop earrings adorn many of the ladies in Tamara Santibanez’s tattoos, which are inspired by West Coast Chicano-style tattooing. With all their material adornments, these tattooed women are never overshadowed. Arching their eyebrows, pursing their lips, they clutch roses or a microphone, sometimes beckoning, sometimes condemning, but always alluring. Trained as a fine art printmaker, Santibanez recently began incorporating more BDSM images—slick stilettos, reflective chains, and shiny pleather gloves—into her drawings and prints. Although she first made these drawings as an experiment in technical rendering, they’ve begun to take on lives of their own in her images. Inanimate yet suggestive, these objects dominate the page, and we’re excited to see how she reinterprets them on skin.
Jonas Nyberg
Shop: Kosmos Tattoo (Göteborg, Sweden)
Instagram: @jonastattooing
Leave it to Sweden to produce some of the boldest, most classic tattoos in the business. While Nyberg restricts his palette to just a few colors, he layers them on strong. Inspired by folk imagery, graphic patterned cobwebs and fierce cat heads dominate his work, and while he finds most of his source images in vintage flash, his flat, black patterning and bold yet ephemeral shading (think spray paint!) are unmistakable.
Liam Sparkes
Shop: Shangri-La Tattoo Parlour (London)
Instagram: @liamsparkesok
We’ve witnessed tattooers look at the work of Liam Sparkes and say, “that looks like it hurt.” And while we can vouch for his (surprisingly) gentle hand, Sparkes’ thickly outlined prison-style tattoos are distinctively bold. From barbed-wire collars to intricate Towers of Babel and hatched skeletons, Sparkes’ tattoos always combine humor with a dark sensibility and a love of all things crude.
Kane Trubenbacher
Shop: Hidden Moon (Melbourne, Australia)
Instagram: @kanetrubenbacher
High in contrast and deeply sexy, Melbourne-based Kane Trubenbacher’s tattoos read like film noir. Chest pieces with recumbent women in heavy draping bask in shadow, and bitten black lips with strategic white highlights imply narratives that are anyone’s guess.
Oscar Akermo
Shop: Tattoo Studio 73 (Uddevalla, Sweden)
Instagram: @oscarakermo
At just 20 years of age, Oscar Akermo has already produced black and grey portraits so crisp that they're almost photographic. By age 15, Akermo had begun experimenting with his own homemade tattoo machines constructed with electrical motors and guitar strings, and by 17 he began working in a shop as an apprentice. Now he's one of the best realistic tattooers in the world. With precise, dark black shading and a strategic use of white ink, Akerno creates high-contrast, sharp tattoos that are just as dynamic in their execution as in their imagery. Yet, Akermo can't be pigeonholed: His color work—an almost luminous nebula, a smoothly modeled, nearly three-dimensional red rose, to name two—prove that his skills are boundless.