Today we’d like to introduce you to Carlotta Saracco

Hi Carlotta , we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.

My dream was to become a costume designer so I studied art and fashion, in Paris. At 19 years old I got my diploma and after a few internships in Couture houses, I worked on movie sets for 3 years. As amazing as this experience was, I needed to explore other things: I went to drama school, I had small jobs, one after another, and I traveled. Thanks to that I fell in love with the art of tattooing.
At the edge of my 30s, after struggling in the illustration field, I finally found the courage to step inside a tattoo shop asking for an apprenticeship. It was in California, 6 years ago. After 2 months I decided to quit the shop and started tattooing by myself with what I had learnt and watched.
Since then I have been tattooing all over Europe, in different shops and cities.
A few months ago I came back to California and I am now based in San Francisco.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?

Becoming at tattoo artist is not a smooth road !
One of my biggest struggles was to face the “imposter syndrome”:
Who do I think I am to mark someone’s skin for life? Am I good enough?!

Very high stress would manifest just before each sessions for many years before I could master it and put it asleep. Social medias are an important tool and put even more pressure on creatives.
Thanks to the clients that came back to my needles (and supported me on social medias), thanks to coworkers that would share technical tips, and thanks to my peers welcoming my needles in their shop, I could finally handle this feeling.

Another daily challenge is that we deal with human emotions and sensibilities: from clients but also from coworkers.

Different personalities, egos, life stories, (sometimes even drama) meet in a tattoo shop.
So I had to know my limits, putting boundaries. I am still learning to recognize the people I share the same values and want to grow with.

Tattooing is a tradition, a ritual and a therapy. It is intense, challenging and wonderful at the same time!

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?

My work as a tattooist would best describe as blackwork: Only black ink, no colors, no grays, no white.
I tattoo exclusively my designs. They stand in 2 different categories:

•One is very naturalist. I draw botanical compositions with bold contours sometimes solid black elements that contrast with etching lines details. They can remember Art Nouveau style.

•The second is a work about the woman’s body. It’s about pure lines silhouettes that make echo to the classical pinup tattoos and also fashion illustrations but in a more contemporary and feminist way. There is a bit of Brancusi’s volumes and Josephine Baker’s freedom. These designed costed me a lot of shadowban from medias!

I would say that both styles meet in an Ecofeminist vibe.

Everything I have done is linked to the body movement and storytelling: from fashion to acting classes or even in my ceramics sculptures.

Thanks to my fashion background, working towards the body curves is quite innate and natural for me. The sewing machine and tattoo machine are very alike, same movement and similar set up (like the velocity) but instead of sewing thread I use ink and instead of fabric I have alive leather. I like to compare a tattoo with an embroidery.

It is very important for my mindset to stay curious and keep making/experimenting/learning with my hands and my eyes trough other mediums: clay, paint, photography… and since I work only in black with ink, I put lots of colors in every piece I make!

I am so happy to stand where I am now, to have accomplished it in a very independent way (self taught) and in constant movement.

If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?

Growing up I was very solitary and shy.
My mono-parent was traveling a lot for work so I was independent at a very young age. I went to multiple schools (also in a different country) so I had to adapt a lot. My best friends were my grandparents with who I spent a lot of time laughing and drawing all day long!
Being very shy, in my teenage years, I found shelter in the darkness of movie theaters and in the pages of my sketchbooks.
I always have been attracted to artists that had colorful-weird-punk-goth-romantic LOUD visual identity (often two sided) like Alice in wonderland, the circus, drag queens, Tim Burton, Sofia Coppola, Bjork, Gaudì, Munch, Jim Jarmush, Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, Nick Knight,…

Contact Info:

• • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carlotta_ink/
  • Website: https://carlottasaracco.com/

Image Credits

All Copyrights @carlottaSaracco