Today we’d like to introduce you to Mars.
Hi Mars, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I would say my creativity really bloomed when I moved to Atlanta (almost five years ago) from Cincinnati, Ohio. Living in the Midwest, I started getting tattoos at your typical walk-in shops, which honestly never felt like comfortable environments to me, being non-binary & lesbian. Atlanta showed me an entirely new experience of getting tattoos, where safety, consent, & comfort were the top priority. These artists weren’t at the usual tattoo studios I was familiar with, but instead at collaborative, artist-run or DIY studios.
While I was getting my degree in Sociology, I decided to just play around with the idea of drawing flash designs. I’ve always been into art & drawing, but switching my intention to designing tattoos felt like it had clicked in my brain. I followed this feeling, my designs got more personal & intentional, & then at some point it felt like it was the right time to get a machine & start learning the basics of an entirely new medium. Again, with no expectations attached.
I loved the learning process of tattooing (& still do) so I just kept learning, kept practicing by tattooing fruit, kept picking the brains of artists I knew, & eventually moved to tattooing myself. Fast forward almost four years, I never knew I would be doing this full time.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I would say the biggest struggle is finding safe, non-exploitative studios. So many studios take advantage of their artists skills & time that artists are burnt out, financially strained, & stuck in hostile work environments. Studios that are artist led are usually more collaborative in their decisions, but in Atlanta we’ve seen them close within the first year mainly due to lack of support & poor management.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I specialize in my cross stitch designs & mold tattoos. I love the intersecting other mediums with tattooing, & embroidery feels like a very natural one. I was inspired by pixel art & my grandmother’s quilting to start designing cross stitch patterns, & I thought the many X’s created a really interesting texture & pattern to tattoos that you don’t see often.
With the mold tattoos, I was heavily inspired by Sasha’s (@sashasc.art) work & got to learn under their mentorship for a bit. Sasha is insanely skilled at freehand tattoos, & I was so happy to learn about the process from their perspective. They had me bring in some subject ideas for practicing freehand, & I immediately thought of Dashaplesen’s work, who is a mold artist. The way she describes the growth of mold is very striking & reflected some aspects of the freehand process, so I thought that mold would be a perfect subject for freehand designs.
Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Right now, being a Queer artist entirely feels risky. Queer artists are showing up & creating every day, despite how trivialized or debated our work is.
Pricing:
- budget friendly
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.twigscollector.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/twigscollector/
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@twigscollector
Image Credits
Anjali Shenoy
