We met tattoo artists Sameer Patange and Eric Jason D'Souza over steaming bowls of goat brain soup in Bhendi Bazaar, the Muslim district of Mumbai on the first night of Ramadan. Both accomplished and renowned artists, Sameer and Eric sketch the contours of the future of the tattoo in India, beyond clichés. Texte : Laure Siegel / Photos : Tom Vater
Every year in September, the wealthy neighborhood of Bandra turns into a huge week-long fair in honor of the Virgin Mary. Eric first experienced the event at age twelve, a cross on his hand. "My parents are Roman Catholics from Karnataka, I am not an active follower, but I still consider myself to be part of the Christian culture." For most Indians, the first tattoo is usually religious, Lord Shiva for Hindus, Jesus for Christians. At fourteen, Sameer was more of a black metal dude and had the same design as Phil Anselmo, the singer of Pantera, inked onto his arm. "When I got home looking like that, my parents threw me out. I wandered the streets for three days and eventually came across my father who had been looking for me. He told me to go home and not take everything he’d said to me so literally... " Sameer, now thrirty-six, recalled the context: "There was a big divide between rural India and urban India. In the cities, until the late 1980s, only gangsters, junkies and street people who got tattooed. No one wanted to be associated with that."
But Sameer and Eric got into tattooing as soon as they managed to push social and financial pressures aside, seeing the craft as a blessed opportunity to live off their passion. "I was a professional soccer player and worked in a call center but I left this horrible job and got serious about art. Ten years ago, no family would have let their child go quietly in this way, because it was not a real career. Today there are even opportunities to study graphic design," says twenty-eight year old Eric.
Sameer was trained the old fashioned way, by India’s tattoo pioneer. "I was sixteen, my buddies were fans of Axl Rose and BonJovi, the glam rock style was really big in India in the 80s. They wanted the same tattoos as their heroes and asked me to draw the patterns for them." They decided to go see Dr. J.A. Kohiyar, a psychiatrist who had learned to tattoo in London during his studies. "When Kohiyar returned to Mumbai in 1973, he started tattooing old school flashes at home. He is considered the first "modern" tattoo artist in India.The Doctor was impressed by my drawings, so he hired me as assistant. He also trained Anil Gupta, who later became a super star in New York. »
Eric adds, "Kohiyar is a legend, a big part of the history of India. I refuse to do copies of his tattoos even though people come to see me asking for them. It would be disrespectful". Sameer nurtured his artistic culture, admiring Dave Mc Kean’s collages and Jim Lee's superhero sketches, while spending his weekends at the doctor’s, who finally let him tattoo after two years. "I learned everything with my master. I am open to all styles but I love realism, technical challenges and the emotion of tattooing portraits. In the evening when people go home with their new tattoo, they talk about you and they are happy. «
When he felt Sameer to be ready, Kohiyar let him go and find his way. "I had a lot of media exposure after being inducted as the youngest modern tattoo artist in India at the age of twenty, but I really integrated the tattoo world in 2004. Tattooing was radical at that time." In 2008, Sameer opened his own studio, Kraayonz Tattoo Studio. Since then, he has opened three more shops in Bangalore, Pune and Goa. The latter, a trance temple and hippie paradise, is the other bastion of the tattoo in India,. He employs fifteen to twenty people, manages the apprenticeships of several tattoo artists, and undertakes about three tattoo sessions per month. All this while being one of the favorite tattoo artists of the Bollywood stars.
Sameer's first shop was in front of a courthouse. One day, Salman Khan, one of India’s best known and most controversial actors, emerged from the building. He’d been on trial for crashing his car and killing several homeless people. "To calm down, he came into my shop and asked for a tattoo," Sameer recalls. Since then, dozens of stars have visited his studio. Sameer refuses to tattoo outside of his shop and does no special favors for his famous clients though he does leave his studio to draw temporary tattoos on film shoots. "I always take my whole team to the studios. I like my guys to see the same thing as me and discover different universes. »
Sameer remembers Eric’s beginnings, who had just finished his first apprenticeship with Vikas Malani (Body Canvas): "Eric was my most sincere student, assiduous ... and super popular with girls. It was good for the shop! ". Eric stayed with Kraayonz Tattoo for five years. "At the time we had never been to a tattoo convention, so the Internet was our main source of inspiration. Sameer looked at the portfolios of artists from around the world and then taught us the lines. The style I started with was black and gray shading, then I moved on to traditional and finally realism, my specialty today. »
In Sameer’s shop in Pune, Eric met Aishin Diana Chang, who had been the manager of another tattoo shop in this student city since 2008. The young couple returned to Mumbai in 2013 and opened Iron Buzz Tattoos. Diana, a 33-year-old granddaughter of immigrants from Hong Kong, believes strongly in the promises of the "Dream City", Mumbai’s nickname: "If you work hard, you will make it," she says. The young couple work six to seven days a week to pay the $ 2,500 rent for the small building that serves as both their shop and apartment. Mumbai, Maximum City, is India’s financial capital and therefore the country’s most expensive city where the simple issue of housing strangles a generation of ambitious young people. But Eric and Diana stood firm and announced the opening of their second shop in Pune in June 2016.
The Mumbai Boys want to make the scene that has given them so much more professional. Things really fell into place at the Kathmandu convention in 2015, where some thirty Indian tattooists had made the trip: "Nepal, this tiny, poor and dysfunctional country has been organizing a brilliant convention for seven years now, and that has been a great inspiration for us and pushed us to move to organize a quality event purselves," Sameer explains. A tattoo supplier has been organizing a convention in Delhi since 2011, but the accompanying burlesque show with half-naked girls didn't go down well. "Too early for India!" Eric shouts. "New Delhi is a political and orthodox city, it was too daring." People were demonstrating in front of the convention, holding up billboards with messages like "Stop this dirty dancing!" It was chaotic.”
For Sameer, the journey really began at the Singapore convention in 2010. He watched Bob Tyrell work, a key moment in his life, and became friends with Paul Booth. In December 2015, Booth, the pope of black and gray, accepted an invitation to the Delhi Convention, co-organized by Kraayonz, Devil'z Tattooz (Delhi) and Tattoo Gizmo. "He wanted to take the opportunity to visit India and see the Taj Mahal. He loved it, he even offered us a tattoo on the forearm to thank us. »
The convention was a great success: "This city is much more conservative than Mumbai but paradoxically it is also home to India’s fashion industry. If a guy has paid 10,000 rupees for his tattoo, his neighbor will want the same one but pay 20,000 rupees. Delhi is a city in which people do stuff to be seen. That may be for all the wrong reasons but not a single artist sat around arms dangling over the weekend. " Sameer remembers less glorious days: "I stayed up until 3-4 in the morning to call Europeans or Americans and invite them to our convention, most of them were laughing when they heard that I was calling from India. We still have a bad reputation and it sometimes makes me bitter that we are considered as cruddy amateurs. India is certainly poor, but who can argue with the artistic profusion, we are an incredible civilization. It’s my ambition to get the West to look at India with respect. «
The next challenge is to bring back the India’s ethnic tattoo traditions, an obvious source of inspiration that is hardly valued. "Maybe if Angelina Jolie came to get a tattoo in Rajasthan and not in Thailand, it would be the Indian ethnic tattoo that would have experienced a boom and not the sak yant..." Sameer laughs. “A Mumbai proverb says ‘What you see is what you sell’. If people want glamor then we sell glamor. The Indian tribal tattoo will become trendy when the stars will open the way.
Sameer Patange
Bollywood, cricket and religion, these are the three passions of India right now ...." Sameers muses, only half-joking. "One day I tattooed the portrait of Hrithik Roshan, an actor, on a guy who was a complete fan of him. At one point he realized that I had also tattooed Hrithik Roshan so he prostrated himself in front of me and clung to my legs, moaning "Oh my God, you touched him, it's incredible!" No doubt, in India’s cities, the tattoo has definitely entered popular culture. This, according to the Tattoo Cultur blog, ensures work for the 15,000 professional tattoo artists who were working in the country in 2016. http://www.kraayonztattoostudios.com/ L'équipe de Eric Jason D'Souza http://ironbuzztattoos.com/
