AN ART school dropout is inking up a storm with amazingly lifelike tattoos of celebrities.
Alex Rattray, 33, has a six-month waiting list of
customers prepared to pay as much as £2000 to have customised,
photorealistic images of the famous tattooed on their bodies.
Despite
winning a place at the prestigious Edinburgh College of Art, Alex
turned his back on a career in the mainstream art world. Instead, he
spends up to 13 hours a day in his Edinburgh studio creating works of
art on clients’ bodies.
Recent creations include Walter White from
Breaking Bad, Bruce Willis in Die Hard, Arnold Schwarzenegger in
Terminator mode, Bob Marley, and, er, Stephen Fry.
Alex said he
“just knew” art school was not for him and is now delighted his parlour,
Tribe Tattoo, in Broughton Street, is mobbed daily with body art
lovers. He said: “Art school just wasn’t for me, it seemed designed to
manufacture people to all be the same, and I wanted to do something
different. It was when I was getting a tattoo of my own – my second – at
the age of 19 that it suddenly struck me that this was something I
could do.”
Thirteen
years later Alex now has more tattoos than he can count and estimates
he has personally spent over 100 hours under the needle. But it’s the
customised portraits that he creates for others that are really creating
a buzz – and, no doubt, a sizeable bank balance.
Defending the
price tag attached to his work, he said: “You pay for what you get with
tattoos. There’s a lot of studios out there that will take walk-ins off
the street and just do whatever the customer wants.”
He added:
“This time two years ago I only had a waiting list of about three or
four weeks, then suddenly the requests just started to build up and
build up. I’d already done lots of portrait tattoos but I’m not sure who
it was who started telling everyone to come to me!”
The reason he
is so busy could be down to celebrity culture – and the way well known
body-art fans such as Cheryl Cole, 30, and David Beckham, 38, flaunt
their “tats” .
However
a recent University of St Andrew study found they are still frowned
upon in some circles. It warned that people who are looking for work
should think twice about getting a tattoo, because many people assume
those who have them are “thugs and druggies”.
Alex, however,
thinks nothing can be further from the truth and sees all his colourful
skin-etchings as artwork. Of the current hot trend, he added: “Lots of
people are requesting tattoos of superheroes now, which is great for me
as I’m a bit of a geek! I’ve done Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Batman
and The Joker, and Captain America, among others.”
Written by Unknown
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