Custom Design in 3 Steps
24 March 2021
The interview was conducted by Paula Akpan who then compiled the article together with the answers of Nish Rowe and Minkx Doll. You can read the article here. The following are my full answers to Paula’s questions. I hope you enjoy! Feel free to leave comments and feedback 🙂
You’ve been back in the studio over the last few weeks, how has that been?
It has been intense! I really missed tattooing during the last lockdown, but getting back to it and becoming so busy all the time, after such a long period of stillness, has felt overwhelming. Especially as I have recently moved to a new studio in order to provide a safer space for myself and my clients who are majoritly BIPOC queer people and women. Although the new studio, which is my own and private, gives me so much peace of mind, it also adds on top of all the other responsibilities I have to take alone.
What kind of impact has covid had on you personally, as well as across the wider tattoo industry?
It has impacted me heavily both personally and professionally. At the beginning of the pandemic, I ended up losing a studio and a partnership with 2 other fellow artists, which forced me to look for a studio that would welcome me. Such task was already difficult before the pandemic. I found that during the pandemic, people used Covid as an extra excuse to say no to me.
I wouldn’t be able to speak much about the wider tattoo industry in the UK, because I don’t feel like I belong to it. I have never been able to work for a long period of time at regular tattoo shops. Most tattoo shops follow a very traditionalist hierarchical/exploitative structure, and I don’t want no part in it.
I know covid affected societies across the globe disproportionally. In the tattoo industry, some of us lost so many things and were forced to either stop working or start from zero all over again without any support from governments, whilst the more established and privileged ones made thousands in grants and furlough schemes.
How did you get into tattooing?
It started by accident. It never occurred to me that I could become an artist of any kind. While growing up in Brazil, all tattoo artists I knew of were cishet-men so it never crossed my mind someone like me could become a tattoo artist. I am now 35 years old and I started tattooing in 2017 (back in Brazil) because a friend of mine was given a machine and I thought maybe I could try. I consider it a late start. I was a freelance graphic designer and illustrator focusing on branding. Drawing has always been part of me and I always enjoyed the arts. I grew up collecting books about art and design and I believe this helped me build an aesthetics as an artist.
What do you enjoy about it?
I feel very fortunate for having the most amazing clients I could have wished for. Most of them have racial awareness and are politically engaged, and they make it possible for my workspace to be a space for healing. Everything happened very organically for me, I didn’t plan much or had any career ambitions. I suffer from depression and PTSD, and I feel like a lot of my trauma comes from growing up as a mixed-race Black woman and from the violence I endure in my everyday life. I know this is an experience I share with most of my clients. I feel like my work and the encounters I have with them through my work liberate us—even if it’s only a slow and ephemeral kind of liberation—because it gives us a moment where we connect with each other and with symbols of Black resistance and Négritude* that were denied to us throughout our lives. It gives me immense joy to tattoo the depiction of a Black woman on a Black woman for instance.
*I use the word in French because I’m speaking about the term Blackness coined by the Martinican poet, Aimé Césaire, to which I deeply relate.
As an outsider, it seems like tattooing is a predominantly white male space with few Black women and femme tattooists, is that an accurate portrayal?
It is very accurate in my opinion.
What are some of the obstacles you’ve faced in the tattooing world as a Black woman?
Being aware of the racial/patriarchal dynamics that easily take place makes it difficult for me to navigate most space. Maybe ignorance is bliss, but maybe being aware is what has given me the strength to remove myself from toxic environments.
Many doors were shut to me because of my political identity, but it has also allowed me to deviate myself from the mainstream tattoo industry and to centre QTIBIPOC communities in my work, which I consider to be a great blessing.
I think one of the biggest gripes a lot of Black people can have is finding a tattooist who can tattoo on dark skin. Why is it so important to have people (ideally Black people) trained to work on dark skin? What can happen if they’re not?
I believe that the tattooing process is a very intimate moment. For me, it feels almost like a magical ritual. It is a moment of pain infliction that is followed by a healing process. In my opinion we should choose wisely who we’ll give consent to inflict trauma on our skin. With that in mind I always found it obvious that we should give preference to QTIBIPOC artists.
Doing a good research and finding artists who share a similar life experience to us, will bring us closer to people who care a lot and will ensure that no unnecessary harm will happen. There will be a deep understanding of the value of our lives and respect for our bodies as bodies who are already in the healing process of the constant trauma of racism. Another point is the fact that politically engaged BIPOC artists will never blame our skin for their lack of ability with any tattoo technique.
I have learned a lot from artists such as Tamara Santibañez, Doreen Garner and Jess Fang (based in the US), Índia, Jéssica Barros and Bastos (based in Brazil), about trauma aware tattooing, tattooing as a healing ritual, and the healing power in the encounter of Black bodies during the tattooing process.
Why do you think it feels so difficult to locate Black tattooists, especially women and femmes?
The main reason is clearly gendered racism. But also, it has to do with how disorganised and uneducated tattoo artists in the UK still are compared to the US and Brazil for instance. Racism is deeply rooted in the western way of thinking and every single one of us have our minds doctrinated by whiteness. It takes a lot of willingness and the capacity of letting go of our defensive mode to be able to deconstruct the western colonial mentality within us. It starts by accepting that whiteness is in all of us. And we all have the social duty to dismantle it. So I feel that the political organisation of Black women/femme tattooists is essencial. And by that I mean that thinking as collective organisms instead of as individuals would make us thrive against gendered racism.
Do you have any tips for locating them?
I think this article that you’re writing is the best tip I could give.
What’s your favourite kind of tattoo to work on?
I love working on bigger pieces with flower and plants arrangements. Many people come to me to get images of flora and fauna of their motherland tattooed on their bodies. I find it the most beautiful and subtle way of honouring one’s ancestors. For many Brazilian indigenous cosmovisions, we are part of nature, not more important than it—contrary to the anthropocentric mentality of the coloniser that subjugates everything that is not human (and by human they mean white and male). So when I give people flowers, plants and animals tattoos I feel like it’s a bodily statement of this knowledge, that we are one with nature and that we belong to it.
