Start to finish.
“It all begins with an idea.”
2023 Senior Seminar project at Fort Lewis. My goal with this project was to simply bring light to tattooing as an art. I wanted to document a tattoo from start to finish. I wanted to provide a glimpse into a world I live in for those who never had an inkling of an idea about body modification. I care more about the process and bringing an idea into fruition. I found a client open to this prospect and we began.
her name is nagini.
I know a lot of artists that name the animals they tattoo. The clients we work with also take part in this. I think it was the third session in when Sloane started to call her new serpent Nagini.
There is always a funny position you find yourself in as the Tattooist. A power dynamic you need to honor while you work with a person trusting you to permanently alter their skin. With this comes a great responsibility.
After some time, you can really get to know one another. There’s a running joke that tattooers become therapists for the masochistic type. We get to spend hours together with people who come, looking to be stabbed by our needles. The conversations that result always offer a new and brutally honest perspective on the human experience. This is one of the most impactful parts of my job, something I think would be hard to find in any other line of work.
moving parts
None of this project would have been possible without a videographer. I’d like to thank Dakota Cleveland for the time he invested in this work. I couldn’t have asked for a better documentation of the tattooing process.
Final products.
This will be the first of many documented tattoo series I plan to take on. Overall, this was one of the most rewarding projects I’ve been apart of in quite some time. There was definitely some pressure that came as a result of trying to bring an old yet overlooked art form into the spotlight at a public institution. Still, this was absolutely worth it.