15 Years

IT'S BEEN MORE THAN 15 YEARS since a small knot of people sat around a New York City cafe table to solidify their vision of a radically new tattoo magazine. We started with the basic premise that tattooing is an art form, rather than a decorating scheme for bikers. We knew tattooing was expanding, but none of us had any idea it would become as big as it is today.

Tattooing is not just an art form, but the most primitive and primal of the arts. Since the body is the most immediate and intimate canvas available, it is likely that cavemen tattooed themselves before painting on cave walls. Every world culture has used tattooing in some form.

As an art, modern tattoo is inextricably linked to several other schools of art-thought that were also expanding at the time. These included lowbrow painting, which was just opening as an umbrella movement for skateboard art and aspects of hot rod art. Radical pinstriping was rising from a dormant period, for example. At this point, tattoos had not yet become a job requirement for rock'n'roll musicians, but it was on the way. In fact, in the mid 1990s, while it was still underground, we splintered off an entire magazine featuring tattooed musicians called "Rock'n'Roll Tattoos."

From those sparsely tattooed cafe-table days to this, where it seems that at least every other person on the street is inked, International Tattoo Art has endured, and grown.