For years, I’ve spent countless hours creating original, “pre-drawn” tattoo designs — work made specifically to be tattooed, but always approached as finished artwork first. My available design gallery isn’t sketches or concepts; it’s a catalog of completed pieces built using a mix of digital painting, collage, photo reference, and illustration techniques.
The goal has always been to make strong images that can live on skin — and hold up visually on their own.
When I saw a call for art for “Marked” at SPA Gallery in Barre, I decided to submit a few pieces. Not because I needed to “cross over,” but because I already had an arsenal of original work and wanted to see if it would stand in a more traditional gallery setting. Two of my pieces were selected for the show.
One of the designs has already been tattooed — it’s a living image on someone’s body — and now that same piece will also exist as a framed print in the gallery, available for purchase. That means the work can live on skin, on a gallery wall, or in someone’s home. That overlap matters to me, and it says a lot about how I approach tattooing: I’m not just translating images onto bodies — I’m creating work that functions as art in any context.
This show is a point of pride. My tattoo designs are strong enough to be shown in a gallery, and my tattooing is solid enough to translate those images faithfully onto skin. Both things can be true at the same time.
Marked opens at SPA Gallery in Barre on March 14, from 4:00–5:30 PM.
