Tattoos and art meet in Harlem

By Zoe So

September 17, 2009

Peony tattoo by Andre Malcolm. Photo credit: Andre Malcolm

Black Ink ‘s storefront on Lenox Avenue, south of 113^th Street, does not look much like a tattoo parlor.  The sign of a faded cartoon pin-up girl with the word “Tattoos” stands below street level, barely visible from even a few stores away.   Flash – sheets of paper filled with small sample designs of roses, skulls, Chinese characters and other standard tattoo parlor fare – are absent from the walls, which have been painted to look like soft brown suede.  Instead, framed drawings by famous tattoo artists hang art gallery style in the lobby.

Although there are several tattoo parlors in the Central Harlem area clustered around 125^th Street, few have Black Ink’s custom art approach to tattooing.  The tattoo artists here do only custom work, and do not want the studio to be another “barbershop” style parlor with mass design flash all over the walls.   From the management to the tattooists, everyone who works at Black Ink is a creator or an artist in various media: music production, carpentry, illustration and painting.

One of the studio’s tattoo artists, Anderson Luna, 22, started drawing when he was four.  The walls of his booth are covered with his drawings in fantasy style: a curvy female fairy with a long wavy mane and horns, an angry demon head, and other characters.   In his work booth at Black Ink on Wednesday afternoon, Luna said that most tattooists in the city “are not artists. They just tattoo.  They don’t do art outside of their business.” Luna, a native of Brooklyn, came into tattoo art during his teenage days when he was doing graffiti in the Bronx. He got his first tattoo, on his right forearm, when he was 15:  a large, embellished black ink design of his graffiti name, “Eros.”

His co-worker Andre Malcolm also became involved with tattooing after spending time with graffiti artists in the Bronx who were working in the tattoo parlor Tuff City.  When Malcolm was attending Harry Truman High School in the Bronx in the mid-90s, he started drawing small graffiti style caricatures of his schoolmates.  He would sell them for $5 apiece, and his schoolmates started taping their caricature portraits over their school ID card photos.   So many students started using Malcolm’s portraits to alter IDs that a security guard pulled him aside and asked him to stop.  By then, students knew that he liked to draw, and started asking him to design their tattoos.

Although tattoo design became his new art business, Malcolm was scared of tattoos at first.  His mother, a Jehovah’s Witness, saw them as a desecration of the body and therefore an affront to god.  Some of Malcolm’s childhood references for art were the illustrations in My Book of Bible Stories published by the Jehovah’s Witness affiliate “The Watchtower Society” in 1978. Malcolm said that as a child, he would practice drawing by tracing over the figures in those illustrations over and over again. On Wednesday afternoon in his tattoo booth, he flipped through his worn copy of the yellow hardcover book, commenting on the composition and lighting in the illustrations.

Taking inspiration from Bible Stories, Marvel comic books such as Spawn and X-Men, and Japanese television anime such as Akira, Malcolm kept drawing.  He started sketching in a book, and when he wasn’t selling student portraits or tattoo designs, he would cut high school classes to spend time with graffiti artists in the West Village and Brooklyn.

One day during high school, Malcolm was walking in the Bronx when his friend told him that Ces One, then one of Bronx’s most well-known graffiti artists, was at a nearby tattoo shop.  Malcolm ran to show Ces One his sketchbook, and was drawn even closer to the world of tattoo art.  By 1998 Malcolm had dropped out of high school and started designing tattoos at Tuff City with graffiti and tattoo artists.  Although he left for a while and had lucrative turns working as a runner at the New York Stock Exchange floor and an assistant at a law firm, he kept spending time on creating art and money on supplies and books.  Then, lying in bed one day shortly after September 11, 2001, he couldn’t shake feelings of anxiety about the fleeting nature of life. He decided then to go back full time to art, and started learning the bodywork technique of tattoos.

In the twelve years since he first started designing tattoos, Malcolm’s aesthetic has evolved through the study and absorption of other art forms and artists.  The bookcases in his apartment, which also serves as his private studio, are stuffed with volumes about tattoo and art, covering a wide geographic and aesthetic range: African masks, Tibetan folklore, Norman Rockwell, Impressionists, Japanese body tattoo, Chinese painting, Marvel comics, American vintage tattoo history, the famous tattoo artists Don Ed Hardy and Horiyoshi III.

Malcolm’s tattoos – the ones on his body and the ones he designed – reflect the unlikely combinations of these new and traditional influences.  On his left arm is a large black ink design of a Tibetan princess whose hair is held up with pins tipped with small skulls.  A client once asked for a design representing his mixed Japanese and African heritage.  Malcolm created a tattoo combining waves based on Japanese art prints and an African mask.

About half of the clients at Black Ink are walk-ins who may not have a clear idea of what they want, according to Pete “Puma” Robinson, one of two managers at the studio. On Thursday afternoon, two French clients, who were tourists and spoke little English, came in for their first tattoos.

Alice Pellegrin, a student at a university in Lyon who is visiting New York for two weeks and staying at the youth hostel Jazz on Lenox at 128^th Street, said “I thought it would be so cool to go home with a tattoo from Harlem.  We looked into the store and thought it looked very clean and classy.” She wanted to have the word “dream” tattooed on her left wrist – in a foreign language.  With a bit of help from Puma and Google translate, Pellegrin settled for “dream” in Hindi script.

Other clients are more experienced in tattoo work and come for more intricate designs that take several sessions. Eric Berlioz, 29, came in from the Bronx for the third of four sessions for a full left arm tattoo of a lion and two lion cubs, which when completed would cover an older and smaller tattoo of a lion.  His zodiac sign is Leo; the lion represents him, and the two cubs are for his two children.  Berlioz has another tattoo on the left side of his chest, which he got two years ago: a black and grey portrait of his deceased mother, embedded in flowers.

Pete “Puma” Robinson called Black Ink “a diamond in the rough.”  He pointed to the projects across the street and said, “Around here there are a bunch of bad tattoo places.  My friends would say they needed to go all the way downtown to the Village to get a good tattoo.”  Black Ink’s customers – “all types – cops, athletes, nerds” – hail mostly from the neighborhood or the Bronx and occasionally from downtown or other parts of the city.

Black Ink has tried to be a local urban arts oasis in other ways.  The front parlor doubles as a consignment art gallery space for young local talent, curated by Robinson.  They have also tried offering skateboard, graphic and t-shirt design services.  Robinson said, however, that those services have not been financially viable.  Black Ink has been re-focusing on the tattoo business.

Even the tattoo business has been difficult. Local clients new to tattooing do not always know how to differentiate between different qualities of tattooists and are suspicious of Black Ink’s higher prices. More seasoned customers are already familiar with more established institutions such as Invisible NYC, Daredevil and Inkstop in downtown Manhattan. Malcolm said that the owner of Black Ink does not know much about tattoos, and does not understand how to balance artistic concerns with business needs. Malcolm will be leaving for Daredevil at the end of this month; and his repeat customers will likely follow him to the next studio. But for now, the rest of the team remains hopeful that Black Ink will continue to bring high quality, original tattoo art to the community.