Inked story

It’s always very exciting to meet modern artists and learn about their creative process and way of thinking. This time we made a photo cooperation with talented Ewa Parówka, a hand-poke tattoo wizard, feminist, and a near-Philosophy Doctor, based in Budapest. People inked by her and wearing Gamayun clothes from the Bugs collection were models for the photoshoot. Ewa agreed to answer some of our questions after the shooting.

- Ewa, why did you choose hand-poked way of making tattoos? What’s wrong with good old tattoo machine?

- I started with hand-poke because it felt easier than trying to learn the machine. And then I immediately fell in love with the process, – the fact that it’s slow, quiet, very organic; and also with the outcome, – the way the lines look like, the tiny imperfections. Every line is made out of many dots and I poke every single one manually. It’s interesting for me to be in such a close contact with someone’s skin, so to say, follow the skin millimetre after millimetre. I also like the fact that I don’t need electricity to tattoo. Plus hand-poke tattoos usually hurt less than the machine ones and heal pretty fast, which is really nice.

- Though tattoos become more and more popular, there is still quite strong stigma against inked people in the society. What do you think about it and how does this influence your work?

- Of course there are a lot of misconceptions about tattoos and a lot of stigma attached to it. But the stigma is very classed (and often also gendered and racialized), so it’s hard to make general statement about how tattoos are perceived in the society. But all in all, I think that tattoos are actually much more accepted than the discourse around them would suggest. For example, I have my whole arm tattooed, plus many smaller tattoos, and I have never felt that my tattoos are a problem even though I worked, for example, as a lecturer at university. The more people get tattoos the more normalised they become. For me tattoos offer a very interesting way of making one’s art more “practical”. For example, I love to draw but I have always felt sorry that my drawings remain on paper and have no other “purpose” than being a drawing. Now, when I tattoo my illustrations on people I feel that they start being more alive, they become a part of someone’s body, life, and someone’s story.

- We know that you are doing a PhD at the moment. Isn’t it hard to combine these two dissimilar activities?

- Yes, I am writing my PhD in International Relations, I am on my 5th year, which means I should be finishing soon. People often ask me if it’s easy to combine tattooing with being a PhD candidate and I have to say that it is much smoother than one could imagine. Tattooing really helps me to relax. The repetitive movement of poking, the fact that one can’t speed up the process, the necessity of being present in the present – it all makes the tattooing session almost like a meditation, it’s a bit therapeutic and really helps to rest the mind and get rid of stress. Also, sometimes I listen to podcasts and lectures while tattooing, my customers must think I am a bit insane :)