A tattoo is an image, not just a motif

A tattoo isn't something you place on skin. As an Art Nouveau tattoo artist working in London and Avignon, what interests me is how an image lives on a body, how it follows a line, a posture, a movement, and how it holds up over years, not just on the day it's done. According to a study by Ipsos, nearly 1 in 4 adults in the UK now has at least one tattoo, and the number keeps rising among 25-35 year olds. What that tells you is that people are thinking more carefully about what they put on their bodies, and that's exactly where I come in.

What interests me is how an image lives on a body. How it follows a line, a posture, a movement. How it holds up over years, not just on the day it's done. Every project I take on starts from the same place: understanding what needs to stay, what needs to shift, and what will make the image feel right on skin. A tattoo can look beautiful on paper and completely lose its strength once it's on a body. That's the whole challenge.

Working from paintings

I often work from personal ideas, visual references, fragments of images, or fully custom projects built from scratch. But sometimes I start from a painting. As Alphonse Mucha said: "Line is the foundation of all composition." That principle runs through everything I do.

Some works already have a tension, a structure, a way of guiding the eye that opens up really strong directions for tattooing. It's never about copying an image directly. It's about understanding what gives it presence, and figuring out how that strength can be moved onto skin.

Artists like Alphonse Mucha, for the fluidity of line and composition, Tamara de Lempicka, for structure and the strength of form, and Édouard Bisson, for a certain painterly softness, naturally feed into my thinking. Others, like Caravaggio for light and contrast, or Dalí for something more unhinged, can also come into play depending on the project. What I'm never interested in is the gratuitous reference. What matters is how an image can be transformed, shifted, reinterpreted to actually work on a body.

Between Art Nouveau, colour and neo-traditional

My work tends to sit at the intersection of several directions. Art Nouveau brings its fluid lines, its movement, its ability to create organic compositions that sit well on the body. Colour interests me for depth, contrast, light everything it opens up in a piece. Neo-traditional brings structure, readability, a solidity that's essential when you're thinking about how a tattoo holds up over time.

These aren't labels. They cross differently in every project. Some pieces will be more constructed, more decorative, more fluid. Others will have something more direct, more graphic, more grounded. What always matters is the coherence of the whole, how an image holds, breathes, and keeps its presence. As the Victoria & Albert Museum in London puts it, Art Nouveau was the first truly international style, born in Europe, it crossed continents without losing its identity. That staying power is exactly what I'm after in a tattoo.

Thinking about the body and about time

Thinking through a tattoo means thinking about how it will age. How a piece reads, the space left for contrast, the balance between masses, the way the eye moves through it, all of that matters as much as the original idea. A tattoo doesn't need to be loaded to be strong. It needs to be right.

Getting tattooed in London

I work between Avignon and London, available for guest spots and larger projects. If you have a specific idea, a reference in mind, a project inspired by a painting, or simply a direction you'd like to explore, you can get in touch directly via the contact page or browse the portfolio first.