One Chest Piece, Three Covers

The same tattoo of mine went around Europe on three magazine covers: the German Tätowier Magazin in April 2004, the Spanish Tattoo Arte in issue #27, and the Swedish Scandinavian Tattoo Magazine in issue #38 of 2005.

All three covers show Lotte Rotten, herself an artist, and on each of them the same chest piece of mine: a girl's face with wings spread across the collarbones, in black and grey. Three countries, three different settings, and every time the tattoo is what holds the frame.

What a Cover Asks

A cover is a hard test for a tattoo. It is one photo, seen for a second from across a newsstand, often half covered by headlines. A piece that works there has a clear shape, sits on the body the way the body moves, and reads before any detail does. That chest piece was made long before I worked only in the Japanese tradition, but the demand was the same one I work by today: the tattoo has to read from a distance first.

A Masthead

One more cover story belongs here. In 2006 the Russian magazine Tattoo Master asked me to design its logo. I started from a sketch of the lettering, drew several variations, and the final version took its place at the top of the magazine's covers. My columns for the same magazine are on the Tattoo Master page.