Author Chris van Laak
Photographer Chris van Laak
A tattoo can be like a fashion accessory that adds a little something extra to your appearance. The main difference, obviously, is that a tattoo stays with you forever, and those who are planning to get their first one often think it should be a unique design that expresses a side of their personality that will never change. Something that’s theirs and theirs only.
When you walk into Hello Tattoo Studio (你好紋身) in Taipei’s Da’an District, you’ll find almost every inch of the walls plastered with flash tattoo designs. Jimmy Shy, who founded the bespoke studio in 2011, can customize them for you, but 100 percent uniqueness is not the point. Many have had the same designs tattooed before, by Jimmy and by others.
Most of them are originally by Pinky Yun, a legendary tattoo artist whose career led him from Shanghai to Hong Kong and eventually San Jose, where he passed away at the age of 83 in 2010. Jimmy, who also splits his time between East Asia and the US, where he has a permanent gig at Liberty Tattoo in Seattle, is one of the people who know Pinky’s oeuvre best.
“Are you the world’s No.1 Pinky expert, Jimmy?” I asked him when I visited Hello Tattoo last month, this time not to get a tattoo.
Jimmy, who is not exactly a shy person, went for the appropriate, humble answer.
“Pinky’s nephew is also a tattoo artist,” Jimmy said. “He obviously knows things that I don’t know.”
Jimmy, who’s also happy to prepare one-of-a-kind designs according to customers’ wishes, sees himself as part of a long artistic tradition. His branch of it is the American Traditional, a style of tattoo that emerged in the first half of the 20th century in the US, where vaudeville show performers and sailors were some of the main adherents of a burgeoning tattoo culture. Many Traditional designs, with their bold outlines and solid colors, feature naval themes to this day.
When Jimmy started tattooing as an apprentice in 2008, it was the American Traditional that caught his eye, and when he opened his studio three years later, it was the first one in Taiwan to focus on this style.
Does Taiwan love tattoos?
Taiwan has a long history of tattoo culture, with the traditions of Indigenous communities dating back to a time before written records. In those communities, getting a tattoo is closely connected to social status and achievement. Community members are allowed to get certain patterns or designs tattooed only after they have passed the corresponding milestone in life.
Tattoos are also a social marker in another “community” in Taiwan: Organized crime, where gang membership and status within the gang are often expressed through tattoos. The preferred style here is the Japanese Traditional, which is also common among Japanese gangsters and has probably been “imported” to Taiwan from there.
Especially the connection between organized crime and tattoos might make people in Taiwan and Japan skeptical of tattoos and those who have them.
In general though, Jimmy thinks Taiwanese are more open toward tattoos.
“People love new stuff, in terms of food, styles, entertainment,” he said. “They also love tattoos—maybe not on their son or daughter though.”
This ambivalent sentiment toward tattoos is certainly not unique to Taiwan. It’s understandable even to people like me, who have tattoos, including some that I wouldn’t want to get again if I hadn’t gotten them years ago.
Never out of style
When Jimmy started tattooing, American Traditionals were trending in the West, boosted, among other things, by TV shows such as Miami Ink. Although tattoo trends have moved on since the first decade of the 2000s, Traditionals have never fully fallen out of fashion and Jimmy has a base of loyal customers who come back again and again, maybe until they run out of skin space.
Some tattoo aficionados follow a long term plan to turn their bodies into coherent works of art; those among them who prefer the American Traditional style, though, usually don’t mind that their scattered tattoos simply reflect certain times in their life or the mood they were in when they walked into a studio to get a certain flash design tattooed. (At least that’s my observation.)
The reason why this more playful approach works well here is maybe because flash designs have already stood the test of time. Your tattoo won’t turn out to be “ugly” a few years down the road.
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Jimmy sees his role not so much as someone who creates tattoos based on his own artistic genius, but as someone who stands on the shoulders of giants—in the first place Pinky Yun—and adds a little something of his own to a long tradition.
In the early years of Hello Tattoo, Jimmy sought to add a distinctive Asian twist to American Traditionals, drawing inspiration from folk art displayed in temples and ancient works of art collected in the National Palace Museum.
“I thought I was doing something unique, but then a friend introduced me to Pinky’s work,” Jimmy said. “It blew my mind. Pinky had already done it all.”
Ever since discovering Pinky—thanks to his friend Chad Koeplinger, a renowned tattoo artist from Nashville, Tennessee—he has been studying the classics of the American Traditional and those who have reinterpreted them. This has become ever more central to him. Like every serious tattoo artist, he seeks to continue to refine his style and technique, but he finds it equally important to study the work of others.
Therefore, when getting a tattoo from Jimmy, chit-chat might turn into philosophizing about how cultural tropes are constantly being reinterpreted, including by people with different cultural backgrounds who will end up adding something new to an old tradition.
“If you look, for example, at depictions of Jesus in traditional Chinese art, you’ll realize it’s Jesus, but he will be depicted in an Asian way, regardless of whether the artist did so deliberately,” he said.
His main focus remains on studying Pinky’s work, with his unique blend of Asian mythology and the American Traditional, as well as collecting flash designs created by him and passing them on to the skin of his customers.
“Pinky was a once-in-a-century artist,” Jimmy said.
At the same time though, Jimmy is also a critic of his work. When he looks at one of his designs, or customizes it for a customer, he always tries to ask himself “do I like it because it’s a great work of art, or do I like it just because it’s from Pinky and it’s an expression of his style?”
Keeping a tradition alive the way Jimmy does it means holding it to the highest standard—and he applies the same standard to every tattoo he pokes into a customer’s skin.
