One of the questions I get asked most often is: What tattoos age the best over time? When people are asking about this they are usually talking about style: Fine line versus bold tattoos, black and gray versus color, delicate versus heavy. But honestly, this simplifies something that is actually pretty nuanced. To me, what determines how a tattoo ages has less to do with the style itself and more to do with how the tattoo is designed and applied. So, let’s get into the factor

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how art carries energy. Energy that stays with people and moves with them through time. The thought struck me as I stared at a painting by William Hanson that we have hanging in our living room. It occurred to me, just how many different moments of human experience this painting had been present for. The artist’s wife Jeannine, had lived down the road from my parents. After his passing, she became friends with my mother. Jeannine’s house wa

How to Design a Captivating Tattoo (or any work of art). — Have you ever seen a tattoo that you just wanted to stare at? Not necessarily because it was shocking, or because the technical execution was flawless. Not even because the subject matter was interesting to you. But something about it kept pulling the eye back in. Surprisingly, this often doesn’t come down to the quality of the line work, or the shading, or the subject matter—it comes down to composition...

Lately, I’ve been thinking about something we don’t talk about much in modern tattoo culture: For most of its history, tattooing wasn’t about collecting images. In many of the traditions we trace tattooing back to—Polynesia, parts of Southeast Asia, Japan—tattooing wasn’t modular. Meaning, it wasn’t about “a small symbol that represents something.” It was more about the communal act of transformation. In Samoa, the pe’a (the traditional tattoo) marked the transition into