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It may be the oldest art form in the world, practised 5,000 years ago by Ötzi the iceman and his fellow copper age Europeans. But with its more recent associations with red-light entertainment and gangland crime, modern tattooing has long been shunned by the galleries that turn lines on canvas into financial assets.
A new initiative in Berlin concedes that the tables have turned. With tattoo studios in the German capital booming but many artists struggling to make a living, the Works on Skin project specialises in selling works by established and emerging contemporary artists that are not to be hung on a wall but to be etched on the human body.
“The art market has frozen up and many studios are suffering,” said the scheme’s initiator, Holm Friebe. “So we tried to think about how we can unlock new fields for artistic practitioners and thus repair a broken market.”
Via its website, Works on Skin sells artwork in numbered limited editions of 100, initially for €100 each but reaching up to €2,000 for the last remaining numbers.
With their purchase, buyers acquire a signed fine-art print of the artwork and a certificate that gives them the one-off right to have it tattooed on their skin, thus “realising” an artwork that until that point is considered “work in limbo”.
Instead of familiar designs such as swallows, butterflies or Samoan tribal patterns, customers can grace their skin with a drawing of the old sound system at the nightclub Berghain by artist Andreas Hachulla, or a faux-naïf neon doodle of a wine-drinking woman by Anna Nezhnaya or a sketch of a female clown by concept art duo Eva & Adele.
While most works can be placed anywhere on the body at any size, others come with specific instructions. Pop artist Jim Avignon’s cartoonish humanoid flame has to be placed in such a way as to ensure “that a muscle underneath moves the fire”, while Via Lewandowsky’s planet-blue dot must be scaled to the buyer’s height to represent the size ratio of the sun to the Earth, thus highlighting “the marginality of human existence in the universe”.
“We are doing something very new and at the same time very old,” said Friebe, a trained economist and nonfiction author. “Because art on skin was the beginning of art history – before work on stone, wood, canvas or paper.”
With 150 editions sold since the launch of Works on Skin last summer, a new set of designs will be released on 17 April.
The initiative is being received with a healthy degree of scepticism in the world of tattooing proper. Fatih Köker set up Berlin-based tattoo studio Noia in 2015, recruiting many artists who were schooled at prestigious German art academies. Unlike the artists represented by Works on Skin, however, those working at Noia do not just create the designs but are also able to do the tattooing themselves.
“It’s quite funny to see how things change,” said Köker. “We were ignored by the art world for ages, and now they are trying to play at our game.”
Traditionally, tattoo artists are approached directly by their clients, without an agency as a go-between taking a cut of their earnings. Works on Skin, by contrast, takes a 50% cut, paying out profits every three months. “Our whole idea is to offer artist studios long-term and sustainable income streams,” said Friebe.
There is also the thorny question of copyright. The certificates issued by Works on Skin stipulate that while the work can, in principle, be passed on to another possessor when the current human canvas dies, there can “only ever exist one valid version”.
Such notions of exclusivity appear to sit awkwardly with the conventions of what art historian Matt Lodder calls a “magpie art”. “Tattooists have long been copying and adapting works of fine art,” said Lodder, a senior lecturer at the University of Essex and author of Tattoos: the Untold History of a Modern Art. “In 1890s London, for example, what people often wanted on their bodies were copies of fine-art prints.”
Until now, the law has mostly been on tattooists’ side. In January 2024, a court in Los Angeles sided with tattoo artist Kat Von D in a dispute over whether her tattoo of jazz musician Miles Davis had violated the copyright of the photographer on whose image it was based.
“The thing with copyright infringements in tattooing is that they are hard to remedy anyway,” said Lodder. “You can’t force someone to remove a tattoo off their body.”
What if someone were to simply get a tattoo based on the images on Works on Skin’s website without paying the €100 or more to acquire the certificate of authenticity? Friebe would be fine with that. “Go ahead,” he said. “But then you would be looking at a tattoo tribute, not an artwork in its own right.”
Established tattooists should not worry that artist studios are about to steal their clients, Friebe believes. “We respect tattooists, but ultimately we work in different fields,” he said. “We sell tattoos by artists who don’t usually make tattoos to people who don’t usually have tattoos.”
