“This painting is a surrealistic technique called decalcomania,” she says pointing to a grey-and-white marbled canvas. The artist also frequently shows her own work, and her paintings throughout the space seamlessly blend the worlds of tattooing and fine art. I did some workshops with teens I went around the room and just scribbled little silly things on them with tattoo markers and then have them try to figure out a way to disguise a cover-up.
“I did four different projects with where they had me tattooing lemons. Now that she has carved out her own specialized niche within the tattoo world, the artist is embracing various outside projects, including a collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I always ask to bring a reference for me, a photograph of a sunset, or a piece of fabric-anything that contains the colors they’d like to see in their tattoo so I can get a better sense of what they want.” “I tell people I’ll make three, but I usually wind up making ten to fifteen. These days, her method for creating some of the larger abstract tattoos begins with a painting for each person. There are right ways to do things, and there are wrong ways to do things.” Whether or not her style is wrong in the eyes of other tattooers is not a huge concern for Wachob, who never felt like she fit the tattooer mold perfectly. “There is a lot of group-think, and it’s actually very conservative. “It was a very intentional act of rebellion and defiance against my industry to work that way,” she says casually. “It didn’t make sense for me to make resemble a cartoon and throw a black outline around it.” More and more people embraced her soft, colorful aesthetic, and it soon became her signature.
“People would bring in a photograph of a flower from their garden and want it to look like ,” she explains. For those who do, it is well worth the wait.įrom the onset of her apprenticeship, Wachob found herself rebelling against the traditional rules of tattooing, meaning an artist should begin a piece with a black outline and work from dark to light ink. That might be why it is almost impossible to get an appointment with her these days. “I had the idea that perhaps an abstract image is more capable of representing something intangible, like an emotion, since so much of who we are is an abstract thought.” As someone who has frequented many a tattoo shop, I can safely say that I have never had an artist summarize a tattoo in this way, and I’m sure that many of her clients can agree. “ didn’t really understand what I was trying to do, especially when I started to make a lot of the abstract work.” She’s referencing, of course, the watercolor-style tattoos for which she is now infamous both in and outside the industry. Everything is orderly and, in contrast to what many might imagine a typical tattoo shop to look like, undeniably chic. Numerous bottles of tattoo ink line a shelf by her station next to a neat array of machines. Five-foot canvases, crafted in her signature dreamy style, are scattered throughout the otherwise minimalist space. “Initially people thought that I was totally insane,” muses the artist as we sip coffee in her airy Brooklyn studio.
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