The signature tattoo

In my view, the early 90s brought an interesting qualitative change in the tattoo world: the emergence of what I have taken the liberty of calling the “signature tattoo”. Bear in mind that until then the work of a tattooist, largely artisanal and marginal, had been done by people with more courage than technical or artistic knowledge. At that moment, probably spurred by the saturation of other fields such as graphic design, those of us from the graphic world with academic training began to take an interest in dermography. That is how the authorship and style of tattoos began to be identified. Little by little, a wave of genuine artistic creation would prevail over purely artisanal production.

In that context I began a career that continues to this day, gradually seeking a style of my own that I am passionate about but which has inherently demanded many hours of study and considerable technical refinement: portraiture and the realistic tattoo.

To name a few, my great references, through the few publications we could get hold of at the time, were Tom Renshaw, José López and Bob Tyrrell. I spent hours admiring their work in magazines and analysing every detail, wondering how I could achieve those fantastic results.

As a result I began an intense personal research effort in search of greater technical precision, which led me around 1997 to build my own machines, the first made in Valencia, to solder my first cat's-tongue needles (now known to everyone as Round Magnum), and later to teach seminars for other colleagues on tattoo machine tuning. Bear in mind that this was a time when the only fairly reliable information we had access to was the book Tattooing, A to Z by Spaulding & Rogers.