My name is Daniel. I'm a tattoo artist working from a cozy private studio in Alt-Treptow, Berlin. Seventeen years in, and I still draw every piece by hand before it touches skin, long enough to know that the right tattoo isn't a trend you chase, it's something that was already yours, waiting for a place on your body.

The pull toward medieval bestiaries and illuminated manuscripts started with the margins. The main pages of those old books carried the serious stuff like saints, kings, holy scenes. But the margins were full of rabbits riding lions into battle, snails fighting knights, demons playing instruments with their own faces. Monks sat with these texts for months, and intentionally drew something absurd next to something sacred. That felt like the most honest response to living through difficult times I'd ever seen, and it's centuries old.

I don't think of tattooing as decoration. Getting tattooed is one of the few rituals modern life still has, a permanent, physical change you choose, that marks something in you before and after. You don't need to believe in anything mystical for that to be true. It's the same reason people get matching tattoos after a loss, or cover old scars, or mark the year everything changed. The image becomes a fixed point. Medieval people did something similar with the symbols they carried, painted, and carved, not because they thought it was magic, but because marking the body and marking a moment have always been the same instinct.

Every tattoo I make starts as a drawing, built with you. If you've got an idea, even a half-formed one, even one that feels a little strange or a little sacred or both, I want to hear it. Let’s create something awesome together.