WORLD TATTOO EVENTS
“Show me a man with a tattoo and I’ll show you a man with an interesting past.”
• Jack London •
I’ve founded World Tattoo Events in 2010 and as the name suggests, is a website mapping Tattoo Conventions from every corner of the world.
My fascination for tattoos started when I was a teen (late 80’s) and I have always been particularly interested by the adventurous and rich history of this beautiful art. At that time I became a really avid collector of any possible tattoo publication I could get my hands on. Unfortunately I didn’t really have any one else in my social circle, sharing my passion for tattoos. For many years it has been a pretty solitary interest. Weird times & no internet.
Things changed in 1996 when I’ve moved for a year to London. A city already very open to the tattoo culture thanks to a long tattoo history and the first professional studio dating back to 1894. I met many tattooed people and after many years searching for the perfect artist, I finally managed to get my first tattoo by Bugs into his historical studio in Camden Town. Bugs was already a very established artist in the UK tattoo scene. He marked on my back the Queen of all modern pin-ups: the legendary Betty Page.
In London I even seriously considered becoming a Tattoo Artist. But I quickly realized that I wasn’t cut for it, since I quite sucked in drawing. So instead of ruining people skin, I decided to follow my nerdy affinity for computers and technology.
So I moved to Holland where I started working at several big tech companies. A booming sector in the late 90’s. In the meantime whenever I could, I was visiting tattoo conventions in Holland and surrounding countries. That was my way to unplug from my corporate jobs and keep cultivating my passion about tattoos. The only problem was that finding timely and reliable information about the next tattoo conventions, was painfully difficult. For some bizarre reason no tattoo magazine or website seemed to have a complete calendar of tattoo conventions. I clearly remember how pissed I was, when I missed events that I was really eager to visit (back in the day there were far less events than these days).
Coming from an IT background I thought to fix this by building a website, listing best Tattoo Conventions around the world. So in 2010 World Tattoo Events was born and it really started as a fun side project, with the humble intention of being useful to people who enjoyed these kind of events like myself.
Surprisingly enough that simple side-project eventually evolved into one of the largest tattoo websites online, listing now over 1000 tattoo conventions.
It’s funny how sometimes life goes but thanks to World Tattoo Events I have accidentally embarked into an incredible journey where my youth dreams finally came true.
Travelling the word full time (now with my wife), discovering new places, visiting tattoo conventions and meeting some of the most interesting people on the planet. It really doesn’t get much better than this and I’m extremely committed to keep building the best online platform for the tattoo conventions industry.
