The tattooist who is both artist and therapist – Margot Mifflin – Aeon

Anatomy is one reason she insists on choosing designs for her clients. It’s not that Roxx doesn’t respect their wishes (‘I’m a people-pleaser’), it’s just that she knows better. ‘A lot of these people, even if they’re 2D artists, they have no idea how things work when it comes to the 3D form. We know what works on the body and what doesn’t. I think it’s changing now where people trust the artist to do their piece and they don’t want to get in the way of the artist’s process. It’s a really privileged, nice position to be in, but I’ve worked really hard to get there.’ And, she says: ‘I don’t want to spend any more of my life doing art that makes my soul disappear.’

Blackwork tattoo, as defined by Marisa Kakoulas in Black Tattoo Art 2 (2013), which features Roxx’s art, emerged in the late 1960s and became fashionable in the ’90s. ‘It is a contemporary tattooist’s interpretation of an art largely derived from Polynesian, Maori and Southeast Asian cultures — often blending together signature styles from different traditions,’ Kakoulas explains. In the 1980s, the iconic artist Leo Zulueta popularised blackwork by combining it with Old School imagery — hearts, flames, and skulls. He was the first to build his style on a bedrock of tribal elements.

‘The black graphic look has introduced an important option to modern tattooing,’ wrote the artist Ed Hardy in Art From the Heart (1991), ‘that of clarity, visibility, and an appreciation of abstract form for its own sake.’

Throughout most of the 20th century, Western tattooing was a closed system wedded to a static roster of folk forms that included anchors, hearts, pin-ups, skulls, devils, snakes, panthers, tigers, swallows, eagles, mermaids, Christs, crucifixes, ships, tombstones, horseshoes, and nautical stars. A wave of Japanese and Polynesian influences enriched it both formally and technically from the 1970s to the ’90s, and by the turn of the millennium a recombinant postmodernism had scrambled the lexicon, allowing for everything from Day of the Dead pin-ups to solid black Banksy reproductions. This is the era in which Roxx came of age as a tattooist. But it was the blackwork that grabbed her: its abstract motifs promised timeless designs, and its graphic simplicity allowed for customising it on the body.

The tattooist who is both artist and therapist – Margot Mifflin – Aeon