Custom Tattoos by WAYAN
Wayan
Typical Hours
Sat – Tues
12pm – 6pm
Wayan’s hours vary, so please email him to secure your appointment at a time that works for both of you.
There’s no award like generational clientele and the blind trust for your skill and talent by a client with their person. Thank you to everyone whose trust and sacrifice made this all possible for me.
Email Wayan to Book Your Service
Artist Spotlight
How did you get started tattooing?
I have always been surrounded by art and craft. The impulse to manifest the visions of my imagination forced the pursuit of the skill to do so, culminating in a classical art education with degrees in studio sculpture and art history from WVU. I was fortunate to make further studies in Bali, Indonesia, focusing on classical motifs and iconography in drawing, jewelry design, and traditional wood and stone carving. There, in my father’s native country, I was able to reconcile the source imagery of my childhood with my aesthetic preferences and predispositions. The next few years were consumed by bronze foundry work and metal fabrication. Wax molding yielded bronze statues and works of art with various artist, both unknown and named in the pages of my history books. It was a privileged experience. In the end, however, it was metal fabrication that provided financially. Tattooing had always been alluring since my university days, but it lacked the mechanical finesse and aesthetic refinement we have come to take for granted today. One day a fabrication coworker saw some of my drawings and asked why the hell I was welding for a living and gave me his tattoo equipment. After a brief look into what tattoos looked like at the time, I was floored. In less than a decade, the art craft of tattooing had progressed beyond my wildest expectations. Both the floor and the ceiling of what a tattoo could be in my mind were completely dissolved and I recognized the rare opportunity to choose the fork in the road of my life. I went from settled and secure, to starting from scratch. I was humbled, my education, training, broad experience in process and craft were all useless before the demands of a new and fundamentally unique discipline. I was reduced to zero again, but in that surrender I found the thing I was meant to do, the thing that would use all I had learned and provide all the challenge and growth I could ever need and allow me to apply that directly to another’s benefit.
How would you describe your style as an artist?
My style as a tattoo artist is best described as amalgamated. Sculptural, illustrative, fluid, dreamscape, realistic yet not realism, dimensional, narrative, storytelling, watercolor, fantasy, anime, form fitting, complex, layered, collaborative, hand drawn, in the moment. I do not subscribe to any particular style and insist that all options are valid provided they contribute to a cohesive and compositionally sound vision. That being said, there are styles I am ill suited for. My design predispositions, tendencies and muscle memory are counterproductive for these styles and I will struggle to do these designs justice. If that is the case, I will tell you, but chances are, I know a person and can put you in contact.
What is your collaborative process like? How do you work with the client to identify the right artwork for them?:
My collaborative process has become as much of the product as the physical tattoo. Throughout the design and execution of the tattoo, a kind of psychoanalytic exchange occurs allowing us to navigate to a clear and shared vision of what we are trying to do. My goal is to ask the right questions at the right times to allow you, the client, to see a much of the picture, as clearly as possible, and describe it back to me. In this way I attempt to extrapolate a detailed vision from the subconscious of another person’s dreasmscape.
Tell us something about your interests...
Goku was a terrible father, Thanos was right, praise be the booty.
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