Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Christopher DePompeis. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Christopher, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

After years of drawing designs up of all of the classic tattoo imagery, I started to get a little more niche and nuanced with my tattoo designs. Lately I’ve been taking a step back and zooming out, asking myself “What would look good on this body, on this particular area.” Many times, the answer is more ornamental, rather than a specific object. Gathering inspiration from ornamental tattoo traditions from around the world, along with design motif’s used in art and architecture throughout world history, I am finding that great tattoos do not have to always be a an object ie. eagle, flower, dagger etc..
A wise tattooer once told me to remember that a tattoo is almost always viewed in motion and snapshot, rather than like a piece of art on a gallery wall in a museum. The person with the tattoo is doing things, going about life in motion – so we have to get across a feeling or emotion with a tattoo very quickly. If you have to stand very still and let someone stare at your piece while you explain all the logic behind it, you are losing out. I want the wearer and the viewer to get a fast emotional response from seeing a tattoo on someone, with no explanations needed.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I started my first tattoo apprenticeship in 2009 in Brooklyn, NY. For a while I kept starting and stopping, unsure if I wanted to commit to it as a career. After trying out a variety of other jobs, I finally made up my mind to get serious about tattooing about six years ago. After settling in a bit, I noticed that tattooing was becoming more niche and specialized. There are more tattooers than ever so more customers are finding artists that fit the specific aesthetics that they are going for. Noticing this, I started to create a catalogue of designs and offering them to the public, to be tattooed on one person only – never repeating the same design. In this way, I began to find my artistic style and “vocabulary” for creating pieces, and slowly cultivating a customer base that sees a good tattoo in a similar way. I do custom pieces as well, but I always have fresh designs being offered out, to keep my drawing practice fresh and unconstrained.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My mission is to create tattoos that give the collector and the viewer a fast emotional response – even at a short glance. I want the design to add ornamentation, accentuation, and beauty to the body overall. I think that the human body is already a beautiful thing, and a tattoo can decorate it in such a way that adds to it in an ornate way. As long as human beings have been around, we have been decorating the body – and I am glad to be a small part of that age-old tradition.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding part of being an artist is the cycle or process itself. First, gathering up inspiration from all the sources I can get my eyes on, and letting it settle in my brain and heart, then transposing the feelings into fresh new designs, allowing it to be filtered through my own life experiences and then my own hand. Then there is that moment when someone sees a design or project idea I’ve made, and feels that same spark of inspiration – not everyone will see it, so when someone comes along who does, it is always exciting. After that, the work of actually putting the tattoo on, painstakingly finding the right size and placement for each persons body. After that, the tattooing process begins, which is a moment when a client can step back from the world and experience the challenging yet cathartic feelings of the tattooing process. It’s a moment where we can either connect and just have a conversation, or go more inward, and have a break from the everyday hustle and bustle of life. The tattoo is then finished, and when the client gets up and can see the work in the mirror, the cycle is complete – until it begins again.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://triplegemtattoo.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chris.tenyo.tt/