We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Reena Wu. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Reena below.

Reena, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Learning to tattoo was something that was very challenging for me. I had been drawing all my life, so I had walked into my tattoo apprenticeship thinking, how different could it be? Turns out, it’s crazy different. Drawing straight lines was never really a big concern for me when creating art, and I would often prefer looser and more uneven strokes when using pen and pencil, so the precision of tattooing was very new to me. I essentially had to rewire the way I approached thinking about lines. For weeks, my first mentor had me just drawing lines over and over in every direction on rubber practice skin. It wasn’t exactly the most creative work, and he was (thankfully so) very particular about the consistency of the lines that I drew. Graduating to real skin was a whole other obstacle for me. I had a lot of anxiety in the beginning, and would shake pretty uncontrollably. I was still able to produce some decent tattoos, but I got in my head, and was questioning if I would ever improve. Thankfully, consistency was key, and I am proud to say the shaking is all gone, and I can see noticeable improvement from now and then.

Reena, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Reena Wu, I’m a Chinese-Canadian tattoo artist and illustrator located in NYC. I went to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and during my time there, I worked to develop my illustration style as well as worked on my technical abilities as a tattoo apprentice at Fleur Noire Tattoo. After graduating in 2022, I went on to become a resident artist at the shop, building an international audience for my designs through social media, while continuing to work on personal illustrations on the side.

The biggest aim I have when creating art is to come up with ideas that feel a little strange and a little off-beat. My designs tends to be heavily influenced by surrealism and comics/sequential art. I try my best to create a strong moodiness in my pieces, and I enjoy exploring the intimacy of human relationships.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I think a lot of what contributed to my success on social media is luck and consistency. I spent a lot of money on Instagram ads in the beginning of my career, and that helped grow my account quite a bit. And I’m not going to pretend to understand how the Instagram algorithm works, but I think because one or two of my posts really took off on the explore page and garnered a lot of engagement, it has helped to keep my posts relatively exposed and gives me a relatively consistent stream of new viewers.

My advice will be to post as much as you can, because even if you don’t love what you have created, everyone else might, and that might just become the viral post you need. Another thing is to actively engage with your followers. I try to make it a point to reply to my comments just to show my appreciation, and I think it closes the distance a little bit between yourself and all these people you may never meet in your life.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect is the connection that you can make with people you probably would never have crossed paths with if not for your art. Tattooing is such an intimate experience between the artist and the client, and regardless if the design we’re working on is a silly little piece of a chicken on a skateboard or a more weighty piece describing their philosophical views, these encounters are something that I hunger for now. I want to know people, and to understand people, and to create art that people will gravitate towards. Working as a tattoo artist has been a great avenue for me to have those experiences and learn the pure joy of human connection.

Contact Info:

• Website: reenawu.com
• Instagram: @reena.tattoo