Kim Tattoo

Joaquin Sánchez Viñas, bet­ter known as “Kim Tat­too” has been a pro­fes­sional tat­too artist since 1989. As one,if not the first, tat­too artist in Spain, Kim set up the first legal tat­too stu­dio in 1989 in Calafell and later, in 1992, he opened the first school for tat­too artists in Eu­rope, also in Calafell.

In 1998 he thought that the ster­il­i­sa­tion process in tat­too­ing was not ef­fec­tive enough and this led him to in­ves­ti­gate fur­ther. Two years later he began to change the meth­ods he was work­ing with, mainly to do with pro­fes­sional hy­giene and se­cu­rity.

After clos­ing down his stu­dio in Calafell and mov­ing to Valls and Masllorenç to work in a more re­laxed en­vi­ron­ment, Kim began to test tools which worked with com­pressed air. In 2008, he in­vented and pro­duced an air tat­too­ing ap­pa­ra­tus ca­pa­ble of stand­ing up to dis­in­fec­tant liq­uids, a world first. The ben­e­fit of using such a process is sim­ple, it avoids any pos­si­bil­ity of viral in­fec­tion.

Later on, in Paris, he at­tempted to in­tro­duce his ad­vances into the Eu­ro­pean tat­too­ing scene, with­out much suc­cess. How­ever, thanks to his method of doing tat­toos his clients are able to sun­bathe and swim just one day after being tat­tooed.

Sánchez fi­nally re­turned to Valls be­cause he felt it is the place he should be. Now, he sim­ply wants to de­velop him­self as an ar­ti­san of tat­toos and as a per­son.

1. Povi­done. A spray used in op­er­at­ing the­atres for dis­in­fect­ing the skin and in­ci­sions.

2. Ster­ile ink. Ster­ile inks of dif­fer­ent colours al­low­ing the client a wide choice of colours for the tat­toos.

3. Ster­ile caps.Ster­ile caps where the pig­ments are stored

4. Nee­dles. They are ster­ile, as is every­thing else Kim uses, and the nee­dles used for tat­too­ing are reg­is­tered in the med­ical reg­is­ter.

5. Ster­ile gloves. These are spe­cial re­in­forced gloves that give higher pro­tec­tion than the nor­mal latex gloves.

6. Ster­ile air ma­chine. This is the ma­chine used to make the tat­too and it must be ster­ilised in order to pre­vent in­fec­tions and the trans­mis­sion of viruses.

7. Ster­ile mark­ers. They are used to draw the out­line of the tat­too on the skin.

8. File cards. They can be ei­ther ma­te­r­ial con­trols or per­sonal records of the clients, where the method and ma­te­r­ial used in the tat­too is spec­i­fied.

9. Tat­too chair. Clients are seated here while they are being tat­tooed.

10. Ster­ile razor blade. Used to shave body hair, thereby avoid­ing pos­si­ble in­fec­tions while the heal­ing process takes place.

11. Ster­ile der­ma­to­log­i­cal tow­els. Use­ful for clean­ing the tat­too dur­ing the ses­sions.