At a small, clinically-lit studio in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, fearsome warriors and mythical creatures glare out from paper drawings lining the perimeter of the space. The tattooist here, who asked ...

While plenty of tattooers struggle to find a solid unique style using a machine, some of the most advanced artists in the world are focused on tattooing techniques that predated modern coil and rotary ...

Japan's tattoo artists have existed in a legal gray area since 2001, when the country's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare decreed that any action that involves putting "pigment on a needle tip ...

GIFU, Japan — Hidden away in the backroom of a modest apartment in this central Japanese city, one of Japan’s last remaining hand-tattoo masters is preparing his tools. Over the last four decades ...

For Horimitsu, the sound of needles painting skin is a soft, rhythmic scratching, like a solitary cricket - "sha, sha, sha". For 30 years he has tattooed by hand in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, needing nothing ...

PHOENIX (KSAZ) --Artists in Japan have been creating permanent body art, well before the tattoo machine was invented. They did (and still do) create tattoos by hand, and there's a local artist who ...

From starkly rendered waves crashing over a shoulder to a stern samurai warrior wielding a sword on one’s back, the striking designs expressed in Japanese tattoos are among the most iconic in the ...

The work done at Onizuka Tattoo is painstaking. As one may expect from any form of tattoo procedure, the feeling is painful but the people who endure this say it is worth it for every colorful, square ...

Tebori is Japanese for “hand-carved,” referring to the indigenous method of tattooing by hand using a sharpened bamboo stick called a nomi. Holding the nomi like a pool cue, artists insert the ink ...

(Part two of a two-part story. Part one can be found here.) At TAV Gallery in the western Tokyo suburb of Asagaya, Charles “Didjelirium” Perez, a well-built Tahitian with tribal tattoos showing on his ...

Japan's Bunshin Tattoo Museum in Yokohama is dedicated to the work of Yoshihito Nakano, who is better known in the body art world as Horiyoshi III, a master of traditional Japanese tattooing. The ...