Tattoo around Tamara de Lempicka: a project that found its place.

Hello everyone!

If you know a little about my history, you already know that my name comes from Tamara de Lempicka. I grew up with this reference around me long before I really understood his work, and over the years I obviously started to look at his paintings in a different way.

I absolutely love the women she paints: very elegant, very present, sometimes almost cold, but never fragile. At one point, I wanted to see what this universe could become on the skin, without simply making a small nod to Lempicka.

This is how this project for a full arm was born.

Initially, there was also supposed to be Degas

The first project combined Madame Boucard by Tamara de Lempicka with a work by Degas. On paper, I really liked the idea. But as we went along, something wasn’t really working out.

We had started with black and grey, and I found that Degas was losing precisely what made up a large part of his strength. His paintings are enormously alive through color. Without it, the mix with Lempicka became much less obvious.

So we did something that I always find important in a big project: we agreed to change our minds. The arm would remain entirely around Tamara de Lempicka.

Building an entire arm without aligning the panels

That was the biggest challenge. I didn’t want to just pile several portraits on top of each other. Each work had to function on its own, but the arm still had to maintain a true consistency when viewed as a whole.

The placement, the size of the faces, the areas of breathing, and the way the images respond to each other count a lot. One arm rotates around the body, so you never see all the parts perfectly face-on at the same time.

And then there was Margot

With Margot, we didn’t know each other at first. Very quickly, we realized that we came from the same part of the Drôme and that we had several acquaintances in common. That kind of detail makes long sessions much more natural right away.

And above all, the project already resonated with her: her mother had painted Madame Boucard. I discovered it during the session and I found it quite crazy, because that image that I had wanted to tattoo for a long time was already part of her story.

I specifically described this first piece in my article dedicated to Madame Boucard's tattoo.

A project that really takes time to build

A complete project inevitably requires patience. You have to move forward one session after another, keep the project’s direction in mind, and accept that it sometimes takes several months in an intermediate state before everything really starts to come together.

That’s also what I love about big pieces. You gradually see the body change, the composition take shape, and the initial idea become much more real.

This project remains very closely linked to my personal history with Tamara de Lempicka, but it has also completely become one of Margot’s own. And ultimately, that’s probably what I prefer: starting from a very specific reference and seeing how it ends up completely belonging to the person who wears it.