the blue blood studios tattoo blog

Let’s get that elephant out of the room right away: walking into a tattoo shop for a consultation can feel intimidating. If you are picturing a scene straight out of an overly dramatized reality TV show, where intimidating artists judge your idea, scoff at your reference photos, or make you feel small for asking basic questions, you can drop that anxiety right now. A consultation is not an audition. You aren’t being tested on your art history knowledge or your pain tolerance.

The tradition of Coptic Christian tattooing represents one of the longest continuous lineages of ink in human history. While many tribal traditions were rediscovered or revived in the modern era, the Coptic cross has been etched into the wrists of the faithful in Egypt and the Levant for over thirteen centuries without interruption. It is a mark that functions as a permanent confession of faith, a historical survival mechanism, and a badge of belonging. The Mark of the Siege

Deep in the central mountain ranges of Taiwan, an indigenous group known as the Atayal once practiced a tradition where a person's face was their ultimate passport to the afterlife. To understand why those facial marks mattered more than life itself, we have to look at the ancestral cosmology of the Atayal people and how colonial history nearly erased a culture's identity. In Atayal cosmology, the physical world is separated from the ancestral home by a rainbow bridge called