Embracing female tattoo culture
Elvia Iannaccone Gezlev is a tattooer and photographer based in New York. Her current exhibition showcasing a a selection of portraits and nudes of tattooed people, artists, musicians and personalities, is on display at Sena Tattoo in Soho, NYC until 3rd June. The exhibition of tattoos and people mostly from the 90s to present day is also available as an ebook .
Tattoo artist Santa Perpetua creates impressively abstract tattoos in her private studio in Brighton. We chat to Santa about how her tattoos tell stories and how her career started…
How long have you been tattooing and how did you start? I think art has been part of my life since I was born. My mother is an artist too, and she basically introduced me into this world. I grew up with art books, pencils and brushes around, art museums were my playground and drawing was my first way to connect with myself. But my interest in the tattoo industry started a while after that. It began when I got my first tattoo piece done in my home town: Montevideo. By that time I was 21, but I didn’t immerse myself in that world until 10 years later. A bad economic situation at that moment, my university studies, my current job as a designer and photographer, my passion for drawing, moving to Spain and some other personal circumstances made the task of starting to tattoo a bit difficult.
So although I really was into the idea of becoming a tattoo artist, I had to postpone it for a while. It became possible when I finally got settled in Barcelona and since 2008 I’ve been developing myself in the profession. Strange as it might sound, I didn’t like tattoos before. I got my first piece done in the early 90s and the level of tattooing was not as good as it is today.
But for some reason, I felt the need to record a permanent memory on my skin, so I made a really simple, silly, too small and too detailed for its size design and I went for it! When I was sat in the tattoo chair, I had a very primitive introduction to tattooing and I completely felt in love with it! I always liked to try different media to make my drawings, and tattooing was another one of them. When finallyI was able to start, I knew immediately that tattooing would be part of my life for good. Since I started I’ve never stopped learning, creating and loving this profession.
Your style is incredibly abstract, how would you describe it? Well, I don’t think we should label things in art. From my view, art allows the emotional expression of the artist to become real. My pieces could fall into abstraction, avant garde, conceptual, graphic art, contemporary tattooing. But if I had to describe them, I’d say that my artworks are just my personal approach to things. I always tell stories that are beyond a particular situation or representation. I love speaking about life, death, and emotions through my artwork. If someone comes to my studio asking to have a bird done, I always ask why they have chosen a bird. I am interested in the motivations behind the tattoo rather than the elements of it. My intention is to build a solid idea, as timeless and universal as possible rather that making just a “pretty” or “cool” image on the skin. I know it might sound a bit ambitious, but my approach to tattooing is more artistic than aesthetic.
Are you inspired by any artists? I am mad about the Dark Ages. I absolutely love that time in history. I get inspiration from the way in which art and artists were conceived – the artistic expression is divine and the artist is just a tool to represent it. But beyond that, and even admiring lots of tattoo colleagues, I mainly get my inspiration from dreaming, and also from music and painting. The list of artists on both branches is pretty long and super varied. But summing up, I’d say that everything that is well made catches my attention.
Would do you like to tattoo? Do you have a wish list of designs? After 10 years of working as a tattoo artist, and almost five years doing it in the UK, I could happily say that I have reached the point in which I do exactly what I want to do. It has been a super thorny path to achieve, but today people tend to give me free reign on all my designs. Thanks to this I’ve managed to evolve technically and artistically. Every tattoo project I take is a challenge that pushes me to improve and do my best with it, and that is extremely pleasant to me. I do not have a wish list of designs, but I do have the wish to carry on being blessed with people who connect with my artwork and trust their skin in my hands. I am immensely grateful for that.
23-year-old James Musker is a Creative Writing student, freelance illustrator, and not only does he write for us but he also writes for Nine Mag. From Bournemouth but based in Manchester, James talks to us about his connection with tattooing, what inspires him and his illustrations…
Photo credit @rob__bell
Can you tell me about your relationship with tattooing? Since I first started getting tattooed a few years back, it’s never not felt vital. I’ve worked every kind of terrible job just to keep getting work! It immediately gripped me, and since my first, I’ve lost count of how many additions I’ve made, as it stopped feeling important to tally them up. The direction of it all has changed so much since I started out, and continues to change. Raw magnetism guides my relationship with tattooing. It’s all dictated by spontaneity and intuition, and although these things have betrayed me at times, I feel I’d never have learned as much as I have without having made some mistakes. You need to make big mistakes to learn big, and however much you might be able to veil a tattoo with meaning, I do think it’s a very instinctual process. You don’t always have to understand why it is you gravitate towards one image over another at the time you do, as the work often speaks for you more than you can for it. It’s easy to be fooled into thinking that each tattoo needs to be loaded with significance. You can’t deny your instincts, and acting on them only serves to better hone your senses. I’ve gotten to this point now where I automatically absorb any visual information I can relate back to tattooing, and it doesn’t really matter where that information is sourced. I can’t help but see potential everywhere.
What’s your favourite piece? My favourite piece is probably this tiny rune I have on my arm. I first came across the symbol in some strange book, and was initially attracted to it for its raw power. It looks as if it was made for skin. If I still had the space, I would probably wipe-out my back with a huge version of the thing! I later discovered that the symbol stands as a protective, teaching force, and I feel like that’s what tattoos have the potential to be.
Photo credit @jdrroberts
Who inspires you? In-terms of tattooing, Duncan X. Aside from being hugely influential in that he leads the charge of tattooing with no regards for the future or anything that has come before it, I remember meeting him and seeing his body-suit for the first time. There were so many overlapping ideas and timelines – history overlaid with new history, but you could see him in all of it. I was stunned by what he’d achieved. Some people lose themselves to their tattoos, in that you stop seeing them due to the extremity of their work. They get aggressive, shocking statements that, although powerful, draw you away from who they are, and shed light on that dangerous fine-line between self-expression and self-erasure. Duncan described his tattoos to me as “black mush”, but seeing his body-suit in-person was evidence that the only thing a tattoo needs to be disarming is a sense of honesty, and honesty can be romantic or vicious or ridiculous or confessional.
Photo credit @jdrroberts
Can you tell us about your illustration work?
I’ve never studied art or anything like that before, but I’ve always been pretty restless. I need something to put my energy into, and without that, I’m not myself. I tried taking illustration seriously a while back, but I was too focused on figurative accuracy and tweaking-out details that I’d always end up driving myself crazy and hating whatever it was I was working on. It wasn’t until things went kind of wrong for me on a personal level that drawing started to feel like a necessity. I finally felt like I was producing sincere work, because it was charged by more than the desire to get things “right”, and with that I gained the confidence to start sharing it. I was world-building with each piece I put out there – creating some place far-removed from where I was at, I guess. There are elements featured in each piece that connect them to each other, and I think that keeps it all suspended in this imagined head-space.
In the same way that tattoos can overlap and interact, I feel that blasting my work over old Japanese Ukiyo-e prints and hijacking the power that they hold provides this immediate sense of depth and history that I love. I’m interested in the ways in-which people read images. I think it’s natural for us to read images from left-to-right when trying to understand them, as that’s the way we read text, but that changes from culture to culture, and with it so does the image that’s being read. When it comes to Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave…’, we are moving with the wave, but in other cultures, they are moving against it.
I like the way tattoo-flash just hangs on the page, and can sometimes look chaotic. I like how there’s no starting point and no implied path to follow, and that you can read different things from a sheet of flash if you connect the significance of the images in different ways. I have my own intentions when putting a piece together, but I like it when people read something in a piece of mine that I never considered. Although I don’t tattoo, I always have tattooing and the strength it’s imagery holds in the back of my mind when composing my work and considering things such as placement and balance.
What influences you? I guess I’m influenced by things I don’t fully understand, and sometimes a singular experience can become this abundant well you endlessly draw from in-hope of grasping it to some degree. I see making things as a way of climbing back inside of moments you can’t necessarily speak to, but the attempt is what’s important. I naturally gravitate towards anything with a sense of romance and surreality. I think that we’re all guilty of distorting our own history through a romantic lens, and I think the ways in-which we mold past-chaos into these perfect, hyper-edited shapes can lead memories to feel fantasy-like. I try to inject a sense of that into my work. I don’t really draw with anyone else in-mind, but it’s important to me whenever people respond to whatever it is I do. I like to think that when people do, it’s because they’ve unwillingly imprinted their own memories and fantasies onto something that was driven by my own. I can be a thief – pillaging the past for references and inspiration, but it all comes back to how these found-images and twisted revisions relate to my own experiences, and what I’m trying to translate.
Do you have an end-goal for your body of tattoos? Not so long ago, tattooing felt like the only freedom I had. I mentioned how important instinct is to getting tattooed, but at that point in time instinct had no relationship to imagery, but more the process of getting tattooed. It didn’t matter so much what I was getting tattooed, just that it was happening. I’d let artists try out all kinds of wild ideas on me, and some sit confidently, but others were just that; wild ideas. I only developed an end goal once I’d made one too many untamed judgements. It was quite destructive, but it sharpened my view. At this point in time, I’m investing in the body of work I want to wear for the rest of my life, and that process involves additions and subtractions, but at least now each move I make feels like a huge step forward.
30-year-old tattoo artist Ellena Donlon works out of Sweet Life Gallery in Birmingham and creates traditional tattoos. We caught up with Elle to chat Korean tigers, as well as what and who inspires her work…
How long have you been tattooing? I started my apprenticeship September 2015. Prior to that I went to the University of the Arts in London studying a degree in Fine Art and I think I graduated in 2012. Graduating was a tough time, I never really enjoyed my degree as I felt I had to stop drawing and painting to make way for more conceptual work to please the tutors, that meant I lost a lot of direction, so I decided to figure things out and move back to my hometown, Birmingham.
What inspired you to join the industry? Did you do anything related to art before? Me and my partner opened up a record shop and as I started to get tattooed again after a good 5 year gap, I realized that tattooing would be my dream job. I started to seek out an apprenticeship, which took a long time, but I persevered it was the only thing I could think of that I wanted to do with myself, and that was worth waiting for.
Can you describe your style? Starting off my apprenticeship my style was very different to what it is now. Then it was purely a case of turning my style of illustrations into tattoos. I’ve only ever really had traditional tattoos on myself, and as my career has progressed my designs have evolved into a stylised version of western traditional.
We love your Korean style tigers and animals, what inspires these? What influences your work? What inspires you? Korean style tigers! They’re so freaky I love them, I have a huge one on my back done by Will Geary who has a crazy good imagination, it’s actually bonkers. I guess I’m drawn to beautiful oddities. I see no point drawing things how they are in real life, the world can be very monochrome it’s up to artists to mix that up, so I guess that’s why I’m drawn to them.
Also you create more traditional women and flora is this inspired by something completely different? I get inspired by a lot of religious imagery particularly from Asia, I love south western tribal art, alchemy and witchcraft and the 70’s! But I must say my biggest push are other tattoos artists. Some of my inspirations are Walter McDonald, Dan Higgs, Robert Ryan, Windle Berry and Gregory Whitehead. All of these people adopt this weirdo traditional style, which is what I hope to one day pursue. I love that surreal style it pushes me to work harder with my own and attempt to think in different ways.
But my true loves are Claudia de Sabe, Rachel Rhatklor, Valerie Vargas, Wendy Pham and Lizzie Renaud. Apart from Wendy Pham these women predominantly tattoo traditional ladies and lady heads. Ladies and flora have always been my favorite subject to draw even before I tattooed, I can draw and tattoo them forever no inspiration even needed, it just cheers me up. I don’t really see my lady heads as a separate thing per se, but they certainly come a bit more naturally to me than my animal or surreal work.
Is there anything you would love to tattoo? I’m desperate to do more famous lady heads. I Would love to do anything from a John Waters’ film, Dolly Parton, Cher, Poison Ivy from the Cramps, the girls from B-52s, Kim Gordon if any of those trigger anyone’s fancy!
Can you tell us about your own tattoo collection. My personal collection is predominately traditional. The thing I love so much about a traditional tattoo is that is gets better with time, like fancy cheese! In my opinion this is the style (alongside Japanese traditional and tribal) that celebrates the body so perfectly, it is timeless yet has still evolved with each decade. I love Dan Higgs, I have tributes from both Nick Baldwin and Teide who are both fans of his work and I think they’re my favorites. Me and my partner are going to LA later this year we’re hoping to get tattoos from Derrick Snodgrass, And I’m saving my hands for Rachel Rhatklor, if I ever get chance to go over to Australia or she guests over here.
Do you have any guest spots planned? I will be guesting at Crooked Claw in Sheffield in April and Death’s Door, Brighton in June, with some other exciting ones in the pipeline!
27-year-old tattoo artist Kerste Diston creates beautifully abstract watercolour tattoos at her tattoo studio, The Drawing Room in Coventry. We chatted to Kerste about her style, and running a fully female tattoo shop…
How long have you been tattooing? I’ve been tattooing around seven years.
How did you start? I started as an apprentice at a studio in my home town in Rugby where I worked for about four years.
What drew you to the tattoo world? Its always something I’ve been interested in. As soon as I turned 18 I was in studios getting work done. I’ve always been more interested in creative industries. I did footwear design at uni before getting my apprenticeship and I did art at college. I can’t imagine not doing something creative as a career.
How long have you been a studio owner? How did it all come about? I’ve had my own studio for nearly two years. It just sort of happened – I left the studio I worked at in my home town in Rugby and I started working in Coventry. I had an old school friend who has their own business at Fargo Village where my studio is based. When I saw him posting on social media photos of Fargo I was intrigued. It’s a village for creative business and I thought that it would be the perfect place for a studio. They thought a tattooist would fit in well and they had a small unit available. My mum and dad encouraged me to go for it and set off on my own! I’m not sure I would have had the confidence without them to do it. But it’s definitely the best desicion I made. I opened in May 2016, and it started as a small private studio with just me. In May 2017 we expanded into next door and now we have myself and four other full time artists.
Who works in The Drawing Room and what kinds of tattoos do they create? We have myself who specialises in abstract watercolour and black work. Hanah who does super cute girly neotrad work, Emily our apprentice who does blackwork and Haley who does minimilist blackwork
Was it your intention to have a fully female shop? To be honest it just sort of happened and now it’s a thing. Most of us have a mostly female customer base too because of the style of work we do so it all just sort of fits. That’s not to say if the right artist came to me looking for a job and was a guy I’d turn them down! It just happens that everyone so far that’s been right for us has been female! We also have lots of guest artists – we seem to have made this reputation where ladies like to come guest too, which is lovely! So many people think a big group of girls can be bitchy but honestly the studio is the complete opposite of that – it’s such a lovely place to work and I’m so pleased to have the team I do!
How would you describe your style? Has this changed? I do mostly rainbow watercolour work, however I’ve branched off into doing darker blackwork. It’s still quite abstract but it’s just opened up some more doors for me work wise!
Do you prefer colour or blackwork? Is there anything you would love to tattoo? I like both colour and blackwork equally – it’s nice to break things up sometimes If I’ve had a week of all colour work and a blackwork piece comes in that’s nice and vice versa! Keeps things interesting! I love to tattoo all things nerdy/ponies and animals mostly!
Do you have any conventions planned? Just one more this year – Scarborough in May. We may look into a few more towards the end of the year though.