So I have a bunch of tattoos - Part 3

Let’s see, where was I with this?

The Story

By the time I was 24, I had a few tattoos and had stretched my ears. I was starting to spend a lot of time on websites dedicated to piercing, tattooing, etc where I saw people starting to get heavier and bigger work.

I was also hanging out with piercers a lot, guys that had a lot of crazy tattoos and modifications. I looked at them as kinds of role-models; they were smart, clever guys that were unafraid to be different and were doing cool work; in a way, the kind of person I wanted to be.

I remember two guys in particular: Dima and Azl.

Dima was a crazy Russian artist I had met online. I have a feeling he did a lot of drugs. We were into the same kind of stuff in terms of tattoos, and we started talking a lot about heavy blackwork– crazy stuff Europeans were getting that wasn’t tribal, just black. Really black, with tons of lines and patterns. I remember it was just me and him that liked it; nobody seemed to be getting that kind of work around us. So we were kind of a team on that level.

One day Dima came by and he had tattooed these massive rectangles on his arm in huge sections. They were black– just black. I remember he had gotten some cool stuff around his eye too, geometric black patterns that looked really awesome. I just remember never having seen anything like that before.

The other guy, Azl, was a piercer and scarification artist who was way into the spiritual side of body modification. He worked at my favourite shop and we joked around a lot. He had tons of tattoos everywhere, really colourful.

One day Azl decided to tattoo his arms black– over top of his current tattoos. One guy he admired a lot was Lucky Diamond Rich, the most tattooed man in the world, so it was understandable that he was into this kind of dense black stuff. He kept it going for many years– I think his arms are entirely black now. And I have to say, they look pretty great.

Anyway, I’m thinking that this is how I got into blackwork.

At the same time I had come across this guy online called Dan DiMattia from Belgium. He did this crazy black pattern work that came from all kinds of origins– Africa, Marquesas, everywhere basically. He did great work. So when I found out he was coming to a tattoo convention in Montreal, I booked with him. This is how I ended up getting my foot tattooed.

It can be complicated to deal with tattoo artists at a distance, especially for the kind of work I wanted. Because it’s based on geometry and patterns, it isn’t easy to design something in advance. This was maybe 2003 and we didn’t have a digital camera, so we decided to do it freehand; he would draw directly on my skin, with no drawing beforehand whatsoever. Since I didn’t really have a concept ahead of time (I just wanted lots of dense patterns), this worked out fine.

Anyway, this tattoo took about 3 hours on convention day. I hurt a ton– there are a million little bones in the feet and the skin is very thin, so it was pretty brutal.

Here’s some pics!

Drawing

Final design

Tattooing…

Final

Read Part 1.
Read Part 2.

Filed by Julien at 10:54 am under random

Hi, I’m Julien Smith.

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