Tattoo Artist Artur Mrozowski has spent 300 hours getting his entire body inked with jaguar spots by his wife, Monika at their tattoo studio in Blackpool.
His obsession with the big cats doesn’t stop at his skin, as he goes by the name of Jaguar.
He has put his skin on eBay for a whopping £75k, but you can only claim your item once the wearer has died. He hopes that the money will help provide for his family… I can think of better ways… and thinks the price is worth the pain he has endured. The listing has since been removed, but the bidding had reached £26.
He believes that his skin is a once in a lifetime opportunity for wealthy collectors, it will create the highest quality leather. He even states that it is in great condition due to his vegetarianism. Indeed there is a market for such oddities, with ‘legal’ human leather being sold in countries such as India. I am currently studying for a Masters degree in publishing, and I have come across book makers being asked to create bespoke books bound in tattooed human leather during my studies.
My boyfriend and I have joked before that if we were to lose a body part that was heavily tattooed, we’d possibly keep the limb, or find a way to preserve the skin, mainly due to the money and pain that went into creating each tattoo.
Have you ever considered selling or preserving your tattooed skin? Let us know what you think by commenting below.
The studio is absolutely beautiful, like no other I have ever been in. Forget sterile white and tiled floors Painted Lady is like stepping into your much loved eccentric Auntie’s house. Instead imagine ornate frames, muted green walls and bare wooden floor in what was once a living room. The collection of art and taxidermy is incredible and the homey feel is so relaxing, this is how I want my house to be like! There was so much to look at while Lucy tattooed my forearm for three hours with her practically silent tattoo machine.
Owner of the Painted Lady, Dawnii Fantana, one of Lucy’s inspirations, was so welcoming with cups of peach tea and cake! What more could you want? Other inspirations of Lucy’s include; Xam (who she’s planning to get tattooed by when he guests in Leeds), Emily Rose Murray, Valerie Vargas, Jason Minauro and Claudia de Sabe (who is tattooing Lucy’s hands very soon) – Lucky thing!
Lucy had drawn the Chinese lantern design with a cute bird a while ago and I had to snap it up for the start of my sleeve, I love everything she does! I’m a real Instagram stalker, even recognising the fruit fillers that Amy Savage had tattooed as belonging to Lucy. We chatted and laughed the whole way through the tattoo swapping stories about not crying at films, university courses, her love for Robert Downey Jr, (we were watching the new Sherlock Holmes) and other nonsensical things!
Lucy has been tattooing for only two years, yet her style is so distinctive; with women and flowers featuring heavily, as she could tattoo these all day. ‘I do try to turn everything into a woman! I try to get away with as much as I can!’ Fine by me, I especially love her flowers with women faces, perfect.
At first when she started out in the industry Lucy thought she’d specialise in realism but her imagination ran away with her, although ‘it is nice to be given some direction’, creating your own art is more enjoyable.
I can’t wait to get stuck into my sleeve, having already spied on Lucy’s Instagram a gorgeous Indian inspired lady face, which I hope she can recreate for my own collection. My arm will be filled with Indian goddesses, tigers and fans at The Femaletattoo Show, in Leamington Spa where Lucy is working at on 14th September.
Lucy also has numerous guest spots planned:
One Day Gallery, Manchester 28th-29th May
Loaded Forty Four, Manchester 10th-12th July
As well as exhibiting originals of her work at The Old Bones Emporium in Edinburgh 6th-12th June
I also got my first ever hand-poked tattoo by Ruth Rollins. I picked a little wishbone from her sheet of cute small dot work flash, to bring me luck. I found being tattooed in this way so relaxing and part from a few points it was pretty painless. I could have lain on the table for hours… I asked Ruth which method of tattooing she preferred: ‘it’s too hard to say which I prefer, they are too different and you’re not comparing like for like’. While tattooing with a machine allows Ruth to create larger tattoos, she, like the person being tattooed, finds hand-poking therapeutic. Ruth is also working at the Femaletattoo Show in September and I’ll be popping down to have another little relaxing hand-poked piece of art!
Having these lovely northern lasses tattoo me yesterday was only made possible by Dawnii Fantana (have a look at her beautiful gypsies), Ruth explains that ‘as relative newbies to the tattooing industry it is brilliant having people like Dawnii who help and encourage you’, Hurrah! To Dawnii, her gorgeous shop and supportive nature! Definitely on my growing to-be-tattooed-by list! I hope I don’t run out of space first!
An edited version of an article by Amelia Klem Osterud – first published in The Launch Issue of Things&Ink magazine.
When was the first woman tattooed? Who was she? Who was the first woman tattoo artist? These are questions that we’ll never know the answer to, because, despite the idea that women and tattoos somehow are a modern phenomenon, women have been getting tattooed for as long as the idea to put ink and needle to skin has been around.
Jessie Knight – picture courtesy of Neil Hopkin-Thomas
Sluts and sailors Over the last 100 years, a stigma has developed against tattooed women – you know the misconceptions, women with tattoos are sluts, they’re “bad girls,” just as false as the myth that only sailors and criminals get tattoos. Nothing can be further from the truth. Look around you, lots of women have tattoos. Maybe your mum has a tattoo, maybe your grandmother or your colleague. Probably your best friend has one, maybe two. Of course, tattoos have risen in popularity over the past several decades among both genders, but a look at history tells us that women have been getting tattooed longer than that.
Jessie Knight is considered to be the first professional British female tattoo artist. Her career spanned from the 1920s through to the 1960s
The Tattoo trick A 2007 Smithsonian.com article includes photographs of a female tattooed mummy from the Pre-Inca Chiribaya culture and small female figurines with tattoos. Tattoo historians have found evidence of women with tattoos throughout the more recent past, including records of encounters with early tribal European women (Picts, Celts) and of course, South Seas Island women of various tribes. Native American women tattooed and were tattooed extensively, and there is conjecture that, despite the lack of written evidence, medieval European women bore tattoos like their male counterparts.
Heavily-tattooed performing women awed audiences from sideshow and dime museum stages. Even British and American Victorian women decorated themselves with tattoos – newspapers from the 1870s forward reported on the “fad” of tattooing among upper crust women of the time. One of the earliest mentions of ladies and tattoos from that time period was in the New York tabloid National Police Gazette. This sensational paper reported on a female tattooist (neither men nor women were routinely called “tattoo artists” then) in 1879 in an article entitled ‘The Tattoo Trick.’ The reporter had located an unnamed woman “found in an unpretentious but neat house in a respectable locality” whose profession was to tattoo crosses, serpents, monograms, and circles on the limbs of the demi-monde of Philadelphia. She “proved to be a pleasant-faced lady, attired becomingly…” with fingers stained “black with India ink.” She said that business was good, and her clients were primarily women, who she tattooed in their homes.
The lady tattooist then answered age-old questions – whether or not it hurt (“to some it is, to others not”) and what it cost (between $5-$25, though possibly as high as $50 for very elaborate designs.) It’s very similar to articles from The New York Times with tattooist Martin Hildebrandt from 1876 and 1882, with the main difference being that the tattooist is female. Hildebrandt comments in the 1882 New York Times article that his “patrons are primarily ladies” and “they pay well for… inscriptions” like birds, flowers, and mottoes. Clearly, women in Victorian New York were interested in getting tattooed and being tattooists, despite the stereotype.
ARTORIA GIBBONS (16 July 1893-18 March 1985) and her husband decided that they would make a good living if she became a performing tattooed lady, so Charles Gibbons tattooed her with images from her favourite classical religious artwork, in full colour.
The negative response In contrast, Albert Parry’s 1933 book Tattoo: Secrets of the Strange Art as Practiced by the Nativesof the United States is part of the reason that, despite many women having private tattoos, popular opinion about women with tattoos was overwhelmingly negative. Parry viewed everything about tattooing as overtly sexual. “The very process of tattooing is sexual. There are the long, sharp needles. There is the liquid poured into the pricked skin. There are the two participants of the act, one active, one passive. There is the curious marriage between pleasure and pain.”
Most of Parry’s writing on tattoos is focused on men and their sexual desires. The very little in Tattoo: Secrets of the Strange Art that discusses women and tattooing is overwhelmingly chauvinistic and negative. Women, according to Parry, most often get the names of their lovers tattooed on their breasts because tattooing is such a sexual act. The women that grace the pages of Parry’s book are simultaneously ashamed of their tattoos and exhibitionist bad girls who cheat on their husbands who are “asking for it” when they are treated badly.
Unfortunately, Tattoo, along with several books like it, made an impression on the readers of the mid-century. The image of a tattooed woman as a bad girl lingered, like the books and articles that reprinted stigma and innuendo. Only now, with more and more women both getting tattoos, and getting publicly visible tattoos, are things starting to change. Certainly, there are many who don’t understand the urge to decorate one’s body, and are afraid of something they don’t understand. But as women start to take control over their public images and public bodies, tattoos are going to only become more visible and accepted. Someday soon, the question won’t automatically be “Why would you do that?” but “Why not?” ❦
All issues of Things&Ink magazine can be purchased from, thingsandink.com/buy – we are currently working on issue 7, due out in May 2014.
A glimpse of what’s to come. We are currently curating an exhibition of original work called IDENTITY set to launch in May at Into You Tattoo&Piercing London
Artwork by Oddboy one of the many incredible artists involved. Details to come soon…
This evening some of the Things & Ink team had the pleasure of joining Ramon Maiden exhibit some of his finest work at Shall Adore tattoo parlour in Shoreditch. Ramon Maiden is based in Barcelona, Spain but tonight we had the chance to see what he’s known best for and that is reappropriating vintage & religious artwork and adorning them with tattoo imagery.
Before we get stuck in and tell you a little more about Ramon Maiden, we must thank Shall Adore for hosting such an amazing evening in what must be one of the warmest tattoo parlors in London. As soon as you walk through the doors your mind begins to wonder and think endlessly. I mean this little statement said it all…
“Enter and discover the world of Shall Adore, Let us take you on an enchanting visual journey in the celebration of that timeless art medium of permanently marking the skin” – Shall Adore
Ramon Maiden was born in 1972 in Barcelona but was never bound to one city, his travelled extensively and has considered NYC as his second home. Ramon has self taught himself his unique art form, his ideas and inspiration are forever dynamically changing and so are his techniques so you never know what to expect from Ramon but isn’t that all part of the fun and excitement? There is not a uniform side to Ramon, his full of diversity which allows his creativity to continuously grow. His work is a reflection of his life and tonight we got to see that, you could feel his career, travels and interests simply radiate Shall Adore this evening.
“My style is very characteristic and people are usually identified quickly. I try not only cause visual impact and also convey a message, idea, purpose.I perceive the tattoo as a form of artistic expression. Many of the artists I follow not only deal with tattoos, but they are also very good at other types of art.”
This was Ramon first exhibit in London this year and we asked why Shall Adore? Why London? and he came back with one word “Friends”.
