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Lucas Ruggieri is a freelance illustrator and printmaker from Brooklyn, NY, who has been making artwork for the past 13 years. Ruggieri has done illustration work for a number of creative projects and has worked with bands like Dragged into Sunlight, Assimilation, Wolfbrigade, Exhumed, Dimmu Borgir, Ghoul, Demiser, and many more. Amidst a successful illustration career, Lucas is now working as a tattooer at Three Kings Tattoo in Durham, NC. We recently added an original drawing from Ruggieri to our gallery (pictured above) and got to talk with him about his illustration career, collaborative projects, artistic influences, and his transition into...

Carlos Tolentino is a tattooer & artist based out of Fayetteville, North Carolina. Carlos specializes in realism & portraiture tattooing and is a proficient portrait artist in a variety of mediums including pencil, oil, acrylic, and most recently, bleach. Carlos has been tattooing in Fayetteville for 14 years and is in the process of opening his own art gallery and private studio space, Gallery 13. We recently got the opportunity to commission a bleach painting from Carlos and talk with him about his tattooing background, artistic influences, bleach painting, and the new gallery space. 

Phil Colvin is a tattooer & owner of Memorial Tattoo in Atlanta, Georgia. Having been tattooing for 30 years, Phil is a versatile tattooer who specializes in a variety of styles including black and gray, photorealism, Japanese, & traditional American tattooing. 

Phil was one of the first artists that told us about stipple shader cartridges: a configuration of 3 liners in a mag tube cartridge. We got excited about the potential of the variant and decided to make our own. Available now, Vulcan stipple shaders are made up of 3 groupings of tight 3 round liners evenly spaced within a mag tube. They are also available in groupings of 4 and 5 tight 3 liners for wider coverage. 

Now that our stipple shaders are here, we sat down with Phil to talk about his tattooing background, some modern history of the Atlanta tattoo scene, and what he’s been tattooing with these stipple shader cartridges… 

Keith Maynard came up in tattooing within the Virginia Beach area and specializes in bold, bright, traditional tattoos. In 2017, Keith & Shaun Hofstetter bought Foundation Tattoo in Hampton, where Keith has been working ever since. His paintings are both highly graphic and intricately detailed, reflecting his love for traditional tattoo imagery.

 WE ONLY SUPPORT LICENSED PROFESSIONALS. What you’re doing is permanent and without the proper training under a licensed professional, you can cause serious harm. We ask that anyone who is not working in a proper shop find information elsewhere. This is not a “how to” article and you will not find any on our site. This is to educate those who only wish to better understand the products that they work with every day.  Remember – Work safe, work clean and work hard.      A brief explanation of Ancient tattooing & tattoo style origins.  In 2016 when I had...