Embracing female tattoo culture
Turkish tattoo artist Eva Krbdk from Daft Art Tattoo creates beautifully crafty cross-stitch tattoos. From up close the designs are made up of tiny crosses, the tiny brightly coloured stitches also look like pixels, but look at the image from a far and you will see a colourful design, much like any cross-stitch embroidery.
Follow her on Instagram for more amazing tattoos
The new series of Tattoo Fixers on Channel 4 is set in a pop-up tattoo parlour where three tattoo artists transform unwanted and regrettable tattoos. The team work on a mixture of clients who wish to change their embarrassing, badly done, rude and crude tattoos. People come to the studio and show the team the piece that they want covering, while giving a short brief and each artist draws a tattoo design and the customer picks the one they want to get tattooed.
The team includes:
Jay Hutton who manages his own studio in Cheshire, where he tattoos realism and black and grey work on celebrity clientèle.
The wonderful self-taught Lou Hopper of King of Hearts London, who was one of the artists tattooing at our recent Feminist Flash day.
Sketch who specialises in traditional bold colour tattoos from Reppin Ink London..
Watch the trailer for the programme below.
Missed an episode? Watch the series here.
Please note that this is a blog post about the programme, we are not actually running the shop. Please get in touch with the artists personally if you have any questions.
Image from Tom Barnes
Katie Joy Crawford has created a series of photographs titled My Anxious Heart to capture and expose her struggles with anxiety and depression.
Katie explains on her blog that:
My Anxious Heart explores and identifies how emotionally and physically depleting general anxiety disorder can be from a personal perspective. As I have carried anxiety for the majority of my life, I’ve chosen to photographically depict this battle and its constant presence. Since it is within my own mind where anxiety is born, I have decided to interpret my roles as both instigator and victim through self portraiture.
Each portrait depicts a part of depression that Katie struggled with, each accompanied by a caption to explain the altering affects of her mental state.
“My head is filling with helium. Focus is fading. Such a small decision to make. Such an easy question to answer. My mind isn’t letting me. It’s like a thousand circuits are all crossing at once.”
“A captive of my own mind. The instigator of my own thoughts. The more I think, the worse it gets. The less I think, the worse it gets. Breathe. Just breathe. Drift. It’ll ease soon.”
“A glass of water isn’t heavy. It’s almost mindless when you have to pick one up. But what if you couldn’t empty it or set it down? What if you had to support its weight for days … months … years? The weight doesn’t change, but the burden does. At a certain point, you can’t remember how light it used to seem. Sometimes it takes everything in you to pretend it isn’t there. And sometimes, you just have to let it fall.”
Follow Katie on Facebook for my photographs and updates on future projects.
Edward Bishop is a 41-year-old photographer from Brighton and author of Knuckles. The book houses a collection of photographs depicting hundreds of knuckle tattoos. We chatted with Edward to find out where he got his inspiration and what he would have tattooed on his knuckles…
Where did you get the idea for the book from? What inspired you? The idea for the book came out of a small exhibition of the project that I put on last year in Brighton. The project was five years old and I felt that the time was right to take stock of the body of work and to do something with it. I started selecting prints for the exhibtion and the construction of the book happened organically alongside this.
Did it start out as a small project or did you set out to create a book? Five years ago my photography didn’t really involve people that much. I wanted to start shooting people’s knuckles and purely by chance the first person I approached had a couple of musical notes tattooed on his knuckles. As soon as I looked at the photo I realised that the project was going to be about documenting knuckle tattoos.
The book became a natural part of the whole project. I knew in my mind as my collection grew that at some point there would be a book, but I didn’t know what form it would take until I started bringing all the photos together.
I worked with a fantastic designer called Lucy Davidson who helped me design the layout of the book and the logo. I had another friend Sak who made the Tattoo Generator on the website where people can go and make their own knuckle tattoos and post them online.
Do you have a background in photography? My background is in the film industry, but I moved over to become a full-time photographer about 8 years ago. I work mainly in the music industry as a portrait and documentary photographer, I also shoot small documentary films from time to time.
What drew you to knuckle tattoos? As I mentioned it was that first set that drew me in. I was hooked as soon as I took that first shot.
Do you have tattoos? People always ask when I take their photo and I say that I live vicariously through the tattoos of others. I don’t have any tattoos, but every year I visit the Brighton and London Tattoo Conventions I come a little closer to getting something done. Knuckle tattoos have a nickname of ‘jobstoppers’ for obvious reasons, but I’m fortunate enough to work in an industry where this wouldn’t count against me, so who knows, maybe next year…
Where do you find people to photograph? On the first day of the project I managed to get 5 or 6 sets just within a couple of streets in Brighton. So at the end of that that I returned home and already had a small body of work for the project.
I spent the next few months wandering around Brighton and London collecting knuckles, and then the Brighton Tattoo Convention happened and I realised that this was a much better way of building a collection of tattoos.
I continue to shoot knuckle tattoos for a second edition of the book. The love and support for the book has been amazing. I’m quite blown away with the reception it gets.
Which knuckles have been your favourites? Having shot 450+ sets, I tend to see the same ones come up quite often. Ones that stand out for me are usually ones that make me smile, like BADA BING, SOMERSET and SANDWICH. I saw MOUNTAIN this year at BTC, which really resonated with me. My all time favourite, and this one I don’t mind how many times I see it is STAY GOLD from the Robert Frost poem ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’, quoted in film The Outsiders – “Stay gold Ponyboy, stay gold”. ‘Stay gold’ meaning holding on to the innocence of youth.
Is their a particular phrase you’d have on your own knuckles? WIDE OPEN is an expression used in the film and photographic industries to mean that a lens is at it widest aperture. I guess that would be suitable for me, given my background.
Get your hands on a copy of Knuckles by Edward Bishop here and see more inspirational knuckle tattoos, you never know you may even see your own!
Jakub Pollág, a Royal College of Art graduate has developed the Personal Tattoo Machine which allows users to create markings on their skin to be associated with memories and meanings, rather than art. “Personal Tattoo Machine democratises the tattoo industry,” he said. “It puts a tool used only by a limited group of people into the hands of enthusiasts, who are seeking an alternative and unique way to permanently mark their meaningful memories onto their skin.”
Pollág has some homemade tattoos on his own skin that he executed with a needle and ink, but he wanted to try and make this diy experience more “user friendly” and accessible. The same way that prisoners fashion tattoo machines out of found objects is what influenced Pollág’s design for his own machine.
Pollág allows only one thickness of needle and a much slower speed within the machine so that it allows the user to focus on what they are drawing…hopefully enabling more precision.
So far the machine prototype has been used to create 30 tattoos on 20 different subjects. However, Pollág still recommends visiting a professional parlour for more accurate designs. “This machine is not aiming to replace tattoo parlours,” he said. “It’s there to offer a more personal option. If you want a realistic portrait of your, let’s say, cat, you should still go to a tattoo parlour and not use this machine.”
Pollág is presenting his project at this years RCA graduate show in London which ends today, July 5th.