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Interview
Neil Stokes - 2 October 2016 2.00 h

Leaving his mark

Kim Tattoo Every Monday at 7.10 pm, El Punt Avui TV's English Hour airs the interview series Going Native. This time Neil talks to Kim Tattoo from Valls, a veteran who set up the first legal tattoo studio in Spain.
- Neil Stokes
When did you start doing tat­toos?
I started in 1989, 27 years ago, and at that time it was not nor­mal to have tat­toos in Spain.
I can't imag­ine there were many tat­too artists in Spain at the time.
No. My tat­too shop was the first legal shop. There were only three or four tat­tooists in Spain.
What peo­ple did have tat­toos be­fore you came along? I sup­pose there weren't many?
No,not many. They were old school peo­ple. It is very dif­fer­ent now. I had con­tact with bik­ers, peo­ple in the mil­i­tary, peo­ple from the United States, Lon­don, north­ern Eu­rope, but for the Span­ish it was new at that time.
How long did it take for peo­ple to start ask­ing for tat­toos?
It was very dif­fi­cult in the be­gin­ning. I re­mem­ber that when I opened my first shop peo­ple said: “What are you doing? You're crazy!” Yes, it's pos­si­ble that I was crazy, but al­most 30 years later you see can see that it was a mat­ter of time. I had a vi­sion of the fu­ture, but I think that I did this for me, be­cause it was my job, my life, my fu­ture.
Is it also an artis­tic pur­suit for you?
Yes, but also it might be be­cause when I was younger I wanted to be a doc­tor, a sur­geon. And I think that be­cause of that I have changed the world of tat­toos. I have added san­i­tary and clin­i­cal el­e­ments, like clin­i­cal study that rad­i­cally changed tat­too­ing around the world. I like art, too, my grand­fa­ther was an artist and when I was younger I would watch him paint­ing and I liked that. So with tat­too­ing I can more or less do both things to­gether. I re­mem­ber when I did my first tat­too, I thought “Wow! I want to do this all my life!”
Where did you have your first ex­pe­ri­ences? How did you train and learn how to be a tat­too artist?
At that time it was re­ally dif­fi­cult. I tat­tooed my whole body be­cause there were no tat­too­ing schools in Eu­rope in that time. There were only schools in Ar­gentina, I think, in the United States, in Japan, where it is very tra­di­tional, but I had to prac­tice on my­self, you know, try­ing out dif­fer­ent lines, colours... I'm now a liv­ing ex­per­i­ment. But one day I thought that if I wanted to do this se­ri­ously, I needed to open the first tat­too­ing school. And so that's what I did.
When was that?
It was in 1994. It was the first legal school, and a lot of peo­ple came from all over the world, from Chicago, Ar­gentina, Por­tu­gal, Brazil, Italy, Spain... I'm happy with my pro­gres­sion in tat­too­ing. I wanted to do more things in my job, I wanted to make peo­ple see tat­toos with an­other point of view, and I think that I achieved that. I changed the stu­dio, the ma­chines, all the out­fits, I in­no­vated. But after some years you be­come tired of this so I came back to the be­gin­ning, I de­cided to re­turn to the ori­gin, more qui­etly, be­cause in tat­too­ing I like above all the con­tact with peo­ple.
I wanted to ask you about that be­cause it is in­ter­est­ing what you said about doc­tors. It seems to me there has to be a re­ally in­ti­mate re­la­tion­ship be­tween the tat­tooist and the per­son you are tat­too­ing. Is there some type of spe­cial re­la­tion­ship?
In my opin­ion, there are some jobs where the per­son must come first, be­cause you can do some­thing for an­other per­son who is just like you. We are all human. You have some­thing spe­cial, I have some­thing spe­cial, every­body has some­thing unique and I have to find it, be­cause a tat­too is for the rest of your life. And that is my work. It's a kind of con­nec­tion. It is a huge sat­is­fac­tion.
Why do you think peo­ple want tat­toos? What is the mo­ti­va­tion?
It has changed in 10 or even 30 years. In the past peo­ple would come and say: “I want this pic­ture” then when I asked why that pic­ture, they would say: “Be­cause I have the spirit of a lion” or they wanted an eagle be­cause they wanted to be free. But now it is dif­fer­ent. Now it is just for how it looks. It's just aes­thetic. Well, some­times peo­ple just think that if their friends have one they want a tat­too too. Years ago you could do art with tat­toos, but now you can do every­thing. Ab­solutely every­thing. You can make a point or you can draw Dalí. Ob­vi­ously, you have to know the tech­niques prop­erly and have the ex­pe­ri­ence, be­cause at the be­gin­ning you just know how to do a few things. But after five, six, seven years you learn more about how to tat­too. When you have been tat­too­ing for 10, 15 or even 20 years, you can tat­too amaz­ing things, like in music, paint­ing, sculp­ture and all those kinds of artis­tic jobs. How­ever, I don't con­sider my­self an artist; for me an artist is an­other thing. I con­sider my­self an ar­ti­san, a crafts­man.
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