Two Interviews, Six Years Apart

The French magazine Tatouage interviewed me twice: in issue #61, April 2008, while I was still working from St. Petersburg, and again in April 2014, shortly after I had moved to New York. The questions changed with the years, and so did my answers.

2008: The Guild and the Flash

The first interview wanted the Russian story: the Soviet tattoo world, the prison designs, how a professional scene grows out of almost nothing. I told them how the number of tattooists in St. Petersburg had grown faster than their knowledge, and why a few of us founded the Guild of Russian Professional Tattooartists, a nonprofit for health and safety education. I was its initiator and one of its founders.

I also told them where my flash came from. In 1998 I was the only artist in a street shop in a city of five million, with almost nothing to show clients but a few worn magazines, so I started drawing my own catalog. By 2008 I had eleven sets and was working on the twelfth.

And I described custom work the way I still practise it: as much information about the idea as possible, then drawing until we agree. "So, sometimes I spend more time creating design than tattooing it." Clients who would not work that way, I refused.

Asked how I had become so famous, I answered honestly: "Am I already famous? I don't think so yet."

2014: Not a Choice, a Direction

Six years later the magazine asked why I had chosen realism and Japanese work. I said I had not chosen anything: "Big part of my job is just a craftsmanship, but I always do my best to improve my customer's idea and I think this fact leads my skills to the style." The realism years and the move toward Japanese tattooing are told in full on the Skin Deep page and in Judged a Decade Later.

What was new was the distance. I had spent six years travelling, and I could see the Russian scene from outside: a few years earlier I had been almost the only Russian artist at European conventions, and now Russian artists were everywhere. I called that progress, and I still do.

The last answer of that interview set the next chapter: "Recentely I moved to New York together with my wife Yana." That move became the Brooklyn studio where I work today.