Spain, 2004

In 2004 the Spanish magazine Tattoo Arte ran an interview with me in issue #25, conducted by Charly Alvarez. A little later, issue #27 carried my work on its cover. It was one of the first long conversations about my work outside Russia, and reading it now, it shows exactly where I started from.

A Tiny Studio on the Fifth Floor

I told the magazine I lived in St. Petersburg and worked "in a tiny studio on the 5th floor", private, not a street shop, because "not only a client must have a right for the private aspect of tattoo, but also a tattoo artist." Since 1998 I had been a member of the British Association of Professional Tattoo Artists and was proud of it: its newsletters were one of the few windows into the wider tattoo world. At home there was still not a single tattoo magazine in Russian.

No Right for Mistake

Asked what experimentation meant in tattooing, I drew a line that has only grown stronger: "while experimenting with tattoo an artist has not right for mistake." So my experiments went into the equipment, into spring combinations on my machines and different tapered needles, never into a client's skin.

I drew flash with coloured pencils then, because it felt close to tattooing and gave me a certain freedom. I remembered a client who wanted the whole St. Petersburg metro map on his back.

Where I Have Changed

One answer reads differently today. Asked whether I ever said no to a client, I said: "You must have a real weighty reason to say 'no' to client!" and that in most cases I would look for a compromise.

Twenty years of watching tattoos age changed that. Today I say no much more often, and I explain why at length in The Work I Don't Take. The private studio, the respect for the client's privacy and the rule that experiments never happen on skin came with me unchanged.