2000 year old Indigenous American tattooing instrument found in Bears Ears region, Utah Robert Hubner

As a Tattooist, I have discovered that our need to tattoo ourselves is often more meaningful than the design we choose. We decide we want to get tattooed, and then we get tattooed. It is a calling. 

Although the original purpose of tattooing has been eradicated by colonisation. And it is currently associated with materiality rather than spirituality, I feel now that tattooing is gradually returning to its original purpose.

As a practitioner, I see firsthand in the seen, and the unseen realms, the physical and spiritual change that my clients are undertaking during the process of receiving a tattoo.

In my 11 years as a Tattooist, I have noticed that the people who choose to get tattooed by me are often simultaneously moving through a new chapter in their lives. 

Sometimes the death of a family member, a breakup, the processing of old trauma and sometimes even a spiritual change that they cannot fathom. Even if the reason for receiving the tattoo is not exchanged via language beforehand. 

I have witnessed many of my clients go through what I consider to be a deep initiation whilst in a tattoo session. I see an individual move through a portal of pain. This pain is what initiates one to the next level.

I have a strict code of personal ethics whilst tattooing to honour this initiation, that what I am doing to this person is sacred, the individual and their body must always be respected, and no judgements should be made. 

I also create clear boundaries between the client’s physical, mental and spiritual space and my own. 

As much as I am a Tattooist in my own life I am very familiar with non-linear spaces, the process of initiation, the overcoming of physical and spiritual pain, and psycho-spiritual psychology. 

I know there is no division between the artist and who is marking your body, and that is why I combine my life experience to guide the individual if necessary through the vulnerable and transformational process of getting tattooed.

Richard