The Intelligentsia
The team at Visual Intelligence is a compact one, consisting of husband and wife Aaron and Macaela, and 26-year-old apprentice, Tere.On arriving at the studio, I met Macaela, a beautiful woman dressed fashionably in monochrome black and showcasing a Technicolor floral sleeve. Macaela runs the show from behind the scenes and spent the entire morning answering the numerous daily inquiries that spill in by email, as well as from the studio’s website and Facebook page. “We get a minimum of 10 inquiries a day,” she explains. “People have an idea and they want an artist to bring it to life. I write back to them explaining why something will or won’t work. It depends on size, colour, detail, time, and the body part they want to get it on – the tattoo has to fit in well.”
The price of a tattoo at Visual Intelligence is decided on a case-by-case basis and is generally based on an hourly rate, but the artists do not charge for the time it takes to draw up a design. “We probably should,” Macaela says, “because it can take two days of straight drawing, sometimes. But then, that person is going to get a lot of work done and be a repeat customer. People will ask, ‘how much is a sleeve?’ It could be $2,000 or it could be $10,000 – it just depends.”
Aaron has been an artist his whole life and has been with Macaela for 15 years – slightly less than the amount of time he has been tattooing – and the couple is expecting a baby in a few months’ time. The two opened Visual Intelligence nine years ago. Painting is their first love; indeed, Aaron doesn’t understand tattooists who don’t make any other art, and Michaela’s canvases and Aaron’s self-designed t-shirts are displayed for sale in the lobby.
“If we could make a living off painting, then we would, but tattooing feeds our kids and pays the bills,” Macaela says. However, the couple doesn’t doubt that “it’s great to be able to work in an industry we’re passionate about and enjoy coming to work everyday. Like every job, there’s always moments where you feel like you need a break. It’s a lot of pressure. But at the same time, it’s good that we’re not just sitting here waiting for our customers to turn up. We’ve got stability.”
Aaron’s 26-year-old apprentice, Tere, has been at Visual Intelligence for two and a half years and has already built up a reasonable clientele, mainly dealing in Maori and Polynesian designs. Tere was honing his drawing technique for most of the morning I was there, until a client came in for a cover-up.
The space where the tattooing takes place is immaculately clean and smells weirdly inviting, thanks to the hospital-grade soap formula Aaron uses. The walls are adorned by a huge mirror, graffiti piece, and Aaron’s framed art, and a gun in a glass case sits by the sink with “In case of zombies, break glass” emblazoned on the front. The room’s focal point is a padded black leather table decorated with a few skating stickers. This is where the magic happens.
Joe: the human canvas
Aaron’s client for the morning, Joe, is what you’d call a tattoo enthusiast – his long-term goal is to be covered in ink from head to toe, including his face but excluding his palms and the soles of his feet. A handsome guy with a good body, bald head and a nose ring, Joe was drinking what transpired to be homemade poppy-seed tea from a Kiwi Blue bottle.Joe got his first tattoo – a piece of barbed wire on his bicep – when he was just 14, because he thought it was cool. (Macaela chimed in – “It wasn’t done here!”) Joe and Aaron knew each other before the latter even began his tattooing career, but lost touch and reconnected in later years. These days, Joe pre-books appointments with Aaron months in advance, driving up for marathon sessions from Invercargill. The two display a nigh-telepathic relationship when Joe is on the table.
Such pre-booking is essential, because Visual Intelligence has a formidable waiting list. “The workload is big but we’ve sort of got it down. It’s got to a point where there’s some things I just don’t want to do – it’s not going to look good and I don’t want to put my name to that, you know?” Aaron says, a sentiment that was echoed throughout the day. “I try and keep my work as unique as possible,” continues Aaron, who considers his popularity as something of a mixed blessing. Wearing a grey cap, a t-shirt he had designed himself, and green suede kicks, Aaron is nevertheless philosophical about this. “It is what it is, I can’t escape it.”
Memento
The day I was there, Joe was getting his scalp tattooed with waves that would extend from the base of his skull over the top of his head, a continuation of the elements theme on his neck. This was his most painful tattoo to date. “Put it this way,” says Aaron. “It was the first time I’d seen Joe sweat.”Joe describes the piece as an “evolution,” with the hope that one day his whole body will be “one tattoo.” Aaron says that it isn’t common to plan a whole body tattoo or a massive area in advance, unless it was a back piece. “In Joe’s case, we’ve just done one piece at a time, and it’s slowly become bigger and bigger, doing small ones to fill in the gaps. With tattoo enthusiasts, they start off with a little bit, and then are like, ‘screw it, I’m going to do my whole body.’”
Joe says that his reasons for wanting tattoos have changed over time. “It’s evolving – you know, as you do as a person – the ideas I had as a young boy, a teenager, and then as an adult. The body is like a photo album. The tattoos I’ve got remind me of what I was, who I was.”
Joe has had positive reactions to his tattoos, although his dad did not want him to get his hands done, worrying it might affect Joe’s job prospects. However, says Joe, “it’s my mum’s favourite one – it’s her name, I got it for her. She hates tattoos, but it’s her favourite.”
Joe puts tattoos’ increasing social acceptability down to rugby players. “The general public see that, if they can have sleeves and neck tattoos, so can I,” he explains. “There’s a lot more art to it these days. It used to be more stock-standard, with a criminal element to it.” Aaron agrees. “Today, you can have anything you want,” he says. “We cater for all kinds of tastes, not just the cliché skull, rose or anchor tattoos.”
Joe’s advice to someone wanting or getting a tattoo is simple: “think big.” He also recommended getting professional advice, and warned against doing the “trendy” thing by copying celebrities’ tattoos. “Trends will always change,” says Joe. “You’re better off to do it because you want it, not because it’s trendy. And never get a girlfriend’s name.”
Aaron admitted that he had his wife’s name tattooed on him, but also that he had recently covered up his friend’s ex’s name on the latter’s chest. “He’s getting married soon, so he kind of had to. That was the second one I’ve had to do on him, actually. He didn’t learn the first time.”
Getting in the zone
Preparation is an important part of a long session like Joe’s. Everyone does it differently and some do it better than others. Joe is a master. On the morning of a session, he feels as if he’s about to compete in an athletic event – “You do your warm-up and your prep, and the body’s going through a torturous thing but you have to remain still and calm.”“Everybody does that mental prep,” Aaron says. “In Joe’s case, he does a lot – takes days of work and makes sure to get a good night’s sleep, drinks lots of water … I could tattoo him for five or six hours, because he’s prepared for it, mentally and physically.”
That explained the poppy-seed tea, which, according to Joe, had similar effect to kava, helping him keep still and suppressing any reflexive twitches. Aaron says that many of his clients use some sort of painkiller. “It takes a while to get into it – the needle hits you and there’s that shock of it.” Ironically, Aaron himself hates the discomfort “but loves the tattoos.” Joe is more metaphysical about it: “there’s something purifying in pain.”
Suffering for your art
The session begins with Aaron drawing free-hand waves onto the back of Joe’s head with blue and purple markers. While Aaron does use stencils, such as for the tiger that adorns the left side of Joe’s neck (currently his favorite piece), “nine times out of 10, we draw it on with Sharpies.” Joe then jumps onto the table, lying on his side while Aaron covers him with a blanket and gets to work.The area of the body and the red of the ink soon make it look as if Joe’s scalp is bleeding rather profusely. There is little chatting, aside from Aaron making the occasional small talk – it is too serious a piece to risk distractions. The silence is filled with the continuous buzzing of the needles and some well-chosen hip-hop, reggae and death metal playing over the sound system. With the occasional break to use the loo (the downside of the poppy-seed tea) and survey his evolving masterpiece with an expression of pure delight, Joe’s session is over in around three hours.
Tania: heart on a sleeve
After breaking for lunch, Aaron is back with a new client, the lovely Tania, a hairdresser at The Salon at Configure Express (coincidentally, Tania did my hair a month ago and I can’t recommend her highly enough). Tania first began coming to Aaron three or four years ago, after hearing the Manuels’ name around town and eventually asking to be put on Visual Intelligence’s cancellation list. Like Joe, she now has regular appointments, and spent her session today chatting away to Aaron and Macaela like the old friends they have become.Having learnt the hard way, Tania strongly advises waiting until you have a good plan and researching tattooists before getting inked. Whilst Aaron is an exemplar of professionalism, Tania has known less scrupulous tattoo artists. “Once I was at someone’s house getting tattooed on my back, and I was sitting on a car seat that had been pulled out of a car,” she explains. “A dog brushed by my back and then three homemade needles broke on it. I thought I was going to get blood poisoning.”
Tania first got a sunflower tattooed on her foot when she was 18, and has been getting them regularly ever since. I asked Tania if she was addicted. “Yes! Ink is my drug,” she laughs. “Coffee and ink.” Today, Tania is getting her sleeve refreshed, a necessity to keep tattoos looking their best after they have been exposed to the elements for some time. She and Aaron planned the sleeve together: it is a beautiful memorial to Tania’s baby son.
While Tania has actually had a friend copy one of her tattoos, she generally believes “they should be individual.” Like Joe, she considers them to be art. “I think we’re creative people,” she says. “I do it for myself, and no one else. Reaction-wise, I don’t get any haters because it’s just who I am. I think when you get them, it’s part of your life and what you’re going through at the time. Every tattoo has a reason for it – your likes and lifestyle at the time. I’m wanting to finish my full sleeve, at this stage, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop.”
