A conversation with Jay Rose, new interviews every Monday.
Growing up in France were tattoos something you found yourself being drawn to from a young age?
Actually it’s quite controversial, as since as I was around 14 years old I wanted tattoos but in the French culture, tattoos have been suppressed for a very long time and still are. I will not go into details about the French tattoo culture but it’s never been well regarded by people so for me at this young age to want to get tattooed was quite crazy, my mom waited for me to be 18 to get my first one, I did it 1 month before my 18th birthday.
Your style resonates and takes inspiration from older prison style tattoos, did you find this was the direction you wanted your work to go in from the start or was it more developed as you learnt to tattoo?
Well as my tattoos have always been made from house parties or from friends at home I think I’ve always like this rough and quite comical sort of tattoos. It’s only after one year of me playing around with tattooing that I realised about French prison tattoos and it was exactly what I was about, couldn’t stop myself to fall in love with it.
You learnt to tattoo in London, how do you feel the tattoo scene varies throughout the places you frequently guest? Do you notice patterns of what style of tattooing is more prominent in certain cities?
I mean, the way I’ve learned to tattoo in London was really rough.. So the scene that brought me into tattooing in London is definitely super different from when my career was good enough for me to travel. But I’m sure every cities has the same sort of scenes, per example when I went to Melbourne I felt like everyone was doing fine lines but I’ve met also a lot of people tattooing from home and doing some prison style.
I believe big cities will have quite similar patterns of tattooing and smaller towns would have less freedom in styles in my opinion if that makes sense.
Your use of classic imagery, more specifically the sacred hearts you do are heavy in religious connotations. Obviously a large amount of traditional imagery is religious, do you feel like tattooing as a subculture has separated the imagery to religion in some ways?
Absolutely yes! People, as myself too, would get religious themed tattoos just for the aesthetic of it. My entire body and back are only covered with a religious theme but in no ways it has a meaning to me, it’s purely aesthetic.
Growing up in France, I’ve been visiting so many cathedrals, churches, cemeteries and etc and I’ve always been fascinated by the architectures, paintings and sculptures in them.
I believe with all these topics of cultural appropriations and ethics, people will look up at religious tattoos and see how many wrong things there are about them but for the moment I’m still rocking it haha
As single needle and fine line tattoos are getting more popular a lot of artists that do this style of tattooing are moving into more contemporary compositions/micro tattoos. What are your opinions on this?
I think it’s great to see how people can innovate and come up with so many beautiful pieces everyday.
This is a world full of different worlds and I love the way anyone can embrace their own.
Who are those you look up to most within tattooing?
As I said above, anyone that would innovate or come up with some original or beautiful in my eyes I would look up too. I’m not stuck to styles so as long as they are doing a good job or even a shit one but doing a great shit job haha I’m all for it!
Who do you feel like you learnt the most from?
The world itself, travelling was my biggest lesson so far.
And also mistakes, doing them is the best way to learn. Never being scared of failure and never giving up, when you think you’ve reach the end and you can’t no more, it’s generally the break through!
Is there a piece of work specifically on yourself you’re really fond of? Be that because of the artwork itself or from the experience with the other tattooer?
Probably my snake currently done by Ed Taemets, as he’s one of my favourite person and artist but also it’s my first piece that I’m doing in a few sessions, so it keeps my interested! I guess it’s a mix of all these reasons and I’m looking forward to see him again so it gives me a good reason for it.
You were stuck abroad when Covid-19 hit, how did you cope with not being able to tattoo? Did you find you were more creative during this time or that it had the opposite approach?
Indeed yes, I was stuck in Switzerland. It sounds as nice as it was. I had a really good time so I can’t brag about it too much.
Luckily I have so many amazing customers and cause I’ve kept taking appointments, the deposits made me survive other seas!
Creativity wise I definitely had some spare time to create, but the new things I got into in this crisis are actually finances and investments. I just realised I had to find more way to make money than just tattooing because I had it good that time but good luck is only a matter of choices we make in life.
