Tattooing Wisdom

This channel archives Drawing for Tattooers, a series I hosted and produced on the Reinventing the Tattoo Network—over 100 sessions with tattooers, apprentices, and collaborators. Episodes start with drawing warm-ups, then move into close readings of art books, technical manuals, or theory. Guests show their work, we offer feedback, and we discuss conventions, opportunities, and developments in tattooing.
The broader project examines what tattooing has become now that it's everywhere—a de facto rite of passage, a mass cultural practice entangled with new media, the economy, and religious commitments, including capitalism functioning as world religion. I'm working through this using psychoanalysis and philosophy read through each other, applied to tattooing as technē—the practitioner's knowledge that engages aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic questions to reveal what tattooing is in itself.
Join us as we search for the true meaning of tattoos.