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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

As I lie on my back in a small Tokyo apartment, a 70-something Japanese man, half his right thumb missing, is rhythmically piercing my skin with minute ink-tipped needles on the end of an aluminium ...

(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 ...

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 ...