Knowing the Past Only Informs Our Future

Tattooing is not an art form easily fallen into so why express your art in this way? 

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I’d just landed in Paris, tongue-tied in English, mute in French, kicked off a construction site after three months. With journalism in my past, starting out in painting or photography (if that’s what you mean by “easily fallen into”) didn’t feel like it would bring in money right away. I was literally hungry. I tried DJing, even teaching chess, but only tattooing showed up as the way forward. Forty bucks a piece. No gun, no fancy setup, not even stencil paper. So I did just freehand, stick and poke. That’s how it began, and that’s still how I work.

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What do you remember about the first tattoo you ever gave someone?

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Elizabeth Hilfiger’s arm, that was the first. I still have the photo from that night: she’s sitting between my knees, cigarette hanging from her mouth. I tattooed the word “friend,” in Russian. Yeah, that was a long night, and somewhere in the crowd the muse of John Galliano drifted in. I barely noticed her—married then, playing chess, passing the joint around. Strange how time folds back: she would later become my lover, then my partner, and now something else again.

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It must be strange to be the interviewee for once, what initially inspired you to do interviews alongside your tattoos?

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My first passion was always writing, and after a while I started to miss it. Tattooing had taken over my days, my nights, my whole orbit, and it felt natural to write about it. At first it was just fragments, little sketches, short stories. But then I realised I want more.

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For the interviews, often your clients share very dark and painful truths with you, as your process is so intimate, do you find this has affected you emotionally?

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Yes. It’s changed me. It’s made me more compassionate. And compassion isn’t about sinking into someone else’s pain, it’s about being present, listening without judgment, and wishing them well.

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Is it a frequent occurrence that clients keep in touch after being tattooed?

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No, not often. And it’s not because I don’t want to, it’s just that I’m always on the move. That said, a few clients have become real friends.

Have many of your clients returned for a second tattoo? If so how has this experience differed from their first tattoo? 

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Maybe a dozen or two. What I find most interesting is when someone comes back for a second interview, saying so much in their life has shifted that they want to mark it with another tattoo. And then there’s this one man in Paris. Every time I’m there, he shows up for another line. Just a single line. By now, he’s got twelve.

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What is your personal experience with your own tattoos? Have they been driven by emotions like the tattoos you create?

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My first tattoo was a text: I’m hurt, and lonely, and sad, but I’m happy and glad. It caught the ambiguity of our nature. Later I discovered suprematism, and inspired by how simple shapes could stir emotion I made a big abstract piece. That one turned out to be my least favorite, maybe because it was “too abstract.” That’s when I realized I wanted my tattoos to be driven not just by emotions, but by experiences—discoveries, achievements, heartbreaks.

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Do you have a favourite tattoo on yourself and what was the story behind it?

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I have too many to choose just one, but the last one feels beautiful to me—“Not knowing is most intimate,” written in kanji. It’s a Zen koan I came across through Henry Shukman. It points to not knowing as a fruitful state, the release of preconceptions, assumptions, the fixed stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

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Finally, is there any particular interview and tattooing experience that has stood out to you the most in the over 800 you have done to date? If so, why is this?

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I’ll allow myself not to answer this question directly, but to share what I’ve discovered. Out of all the interviews, I realized people don’t dream big. They want to travel the world, build a house or a family, be seen, be accepted, find safety, stability, joy. All beautiful, but almost no one has ever told me they dream of changing the world. No one has said, I want to be so rich I can end famine in Sudan, Gaza, or Haiti. No one has said, I want enough power to stop fossil fuel giants or to protect what’s left of wild nature.

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It feels like people don’t dream it because they’ve already decided it’s impossible. And that, to me, is troubling, even hopeless at times. Because almost everyone admits that happiness for all beings would be good, yet most of us only concern ourselves with the happiness of our little circle.

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