Portfolio
Every piece in this collection started the same way: as a complete composition, planned before a single line touched skin. Sleeves, back pieces, full bodysuits, worked in the machine line of wabori or the hand-poked patience of tebori, each one built to move with the body it lives on. Nothing here was assembled piece by piece. Permanent and considered from the first decision. If you've been picturing something like it for yourself, this is where it starts.
作品集 · Portfolio
GALLERY
来歴 · The Path Here
I was selective about who did my bodysuit. I get why you are too.
Japanese was never a style I picked up along the way. I was selling anime drawings in elementary school to buy Pokemon cards. It got me early and it never let go.
I learned to tattoo in Bogota, Colombia twelve years ago and it was Japanese from the first day.
I still took everything else for years. Walk-ins, American traditional, whatever came through the door. That work made me better and I liked it, but Japanese was always where I was headed. The further in I got, the more I could see how much was down there, and I was never going to reach it splitting my attention six ways.
So I stopped taking the rest. That cost me clients. It also made me better, faster.
Because this world is deep enough to spend a career in and still be learning, I wanted every hour I had pointed at it.
Then I went to the source. A year in Asia. Eight hundred miles across Japan on a bicycle with a sketchbook. Temples, shrines, woodblock prints, museums. Not a vacation, I went to study how this imagery actually lives in the culture instead of just getting borrowed from it. The whole year, a polished painting every other day, until it was in my hands and not just my head.
I am over two hundred and forty hours into my own bodysuit and still going. So when I tell you what a piece like this takes, I am not guessing. I have sat in that chair.
LET'S CREATE SOMETHING LEGENDARY
Every great tattoo starts with a conversation.