A Base in Prague

In May 2009 the Czech magazine Tetování published a long interview with me. By then Prague had become my base for a longer stretch: one of my favourite cities in Europe, and a place where I worked as a guest artist at Tribo Tattoo. The interviewer knew my working habits up close, so he asked about the part that surprised other tattooists most.

The Conversation Before the Tattoo

He had watched me spend longer with clients than most artists he knew: redrawing the animal or flower they brought, making it bigger, changing its position, asking for a better reference. And refusing when a client insisted on a copy. My answer then: "every kind of tattoo must be individually created to suite perfectly to a body." When people bring someone else's tattoo, or a picture never made for skin, experience lets me see how it will look years later, "so I can't guarantee positive result that's why I have to refuse."

The reasons have been written out at length since then, in The Work I Don't Take and Process or Product. The refusal itself has not changed.

Price First

Prague also showed me a habit I met in many places: visitors who opened the conversation with the price, before asking anything about the artist's style or abilities. What I wanted instead, I told the magazine, was a client with a definite idea, every detail discussed, and enough time: no rush, no last-minute decisions. That is still how a project starts here.

The Same Story, Another Room

The same year I gave a long interview to Skin Deep, and some answers appear in both: the punk years, Taras Shevchenko, the slow turn toward Japanese prints. That story lives on the Skin Deep page. One answer here was new. Asked why so many Eastern European artists were known for dark realism, I said I could not feel any regional aesthetic behind it: "I think every artist is unique in his art even though sometimes they try to copy each other's style."

Tetování stayed close over the years. It reported on Tattoo Show Prague, where I worked regularly, in 2007 and 2011, and invited me to its tattoo flash calendar in 2008, 2009 and 2011.