Warrior Of Light
Skin Deep|Issue 309
Master of the craft and self-proclaimed “citizen of the free world”, Guy Le Tatooer has spent a lifetime leading the charge of tattooing with a singular mission behind his ‘intemporal’, world-swallowing work: to carry the wearer through this life and into the next. Here, the globetrotting trail-blazer speaks of his wild formative years as a secondgeneration tattooist, the many layers behind his own boundary-pushing body-suit and what it truly means to live outside of jurisdiction
James Musker
Warrior Of Light

AS A SECOND-GENERATION TATTOOIST, CAN YOU SPEAK ON YOUR FIRST MEMORIES OF THE CRAFT? CAN YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU WERE TRULY STRUCK BY A TATTOO?

As far back as I remember, I’ve always been stuck on tattooing. Everyone had tattoos in my family—from my grandma to all my parent’s friends, and when my father decided to start tattooing in the '90s, it was this situation where I just had to do it, too. To get hold of some machines, my father got tattooed, and at the end of the session, he just stole all of the guy’s materials and took them back to his neighborhood, Sarcelle, in France near Paris—such a place, trust me!

He tattooed all of his old friends for about a month before retiring to the South of France to open his own shop. He wanted to call the shop ‘The Metro’, and so he decided to steal some signs from the Parisian underground for the place. Of course, he got arrested and ended up in jail for a few days, but he ended up opening the shop with my godfather. They used to make Spanish tapas downstairs and tattoo upstairs. He mostly tattooed sailors and drunks, and at that point, I was 10-years-old. I was there every day after school. I knew it was my thing right from the start. So, when I was 12, I did my first line with a machine. I was amazed, but life followed, and it was what it was.

Everything broke down. I ended up living on Reunion Island on my own for a year, and when everything got too fucked up there, my father put me on a plane and brought me to New Caledonia where I finally started to commit to tattooing for real at 18-years-old. My first tattoo was a Polynesian swastika on my dad, but of course, I blacked out the wrong part!

CAN YOU SPEAK ON YOUR FIRST FEW YEARS SPENT COMMITTED TO TATTOOING?

Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Issue 309-Ausgabe von Skin Deep.

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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Issue 309-Ausgabe von Skin Deep.

Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.

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