Tattoos: Mo Coppoletta On The History Of Ink

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0:39The most iconic, romantic, if you want, imagery was always used. Why a dragon and not a poodle? Because, you know, at the very end of the 19th century, tattooing was just for the very high end of society. Okay, that's really interesting. I'm sure every time I redraw a dragon, it'll be different. It will have a different personality. Yeah. That's the magic of it. Yeah, absolutely. How many suits can you have? Wow. They're all a jacket and a pair of trousers. That's very true. But they all have their personality. Hello and welcome to The Luxury Dispatch, the podcast that reveals the refined and the rare, the stories, people, and items that make up the luxury industry.

1:22I'm Tom Chamberlain, and today we are talking decorative arts with one of its most respected modern practitioners, Mo Coppoletta. Tattoos is where he plied his trade, setting up the world-famous family business in Clerkenwell, but this is not the world of back-alley symbols and drunken gap year mistakes. Tattoos have for many years been the playground for royals and eminence of Europe and beyond. Why? The artists themselves are part of the broader design movements of their age and give hints as to the world around us, its tastes, its eccentricities, and how it wishes to express itself. And that is what we will be discussing.

1:57Mo, lovely to see you. Hello, Tom. How are you? You look superb. Terry Hayes. Of course. I read the memo. I read the memo. You're sort of Eminence Gris, but in a different model. Today. You said it's broad daylight, and so it went gray. Yes, exactly. Mid-gray. Yeah, very good, yes. Matching the mood of outside. So, in that enormously flattering introduction, which I should say, you are a great friend of mine, so I must say only the truth. I picked out a few terms which really I've learned from you, specifically the decorative arts. But the world of tattoos, it's something that you've been in a very long time, but it is a world that goes back a long way, isn't it?

2:40And I've loved looking into this world and discovering some really wonderful stories about tattoos through the years. So why don't we start talking about that, and then we'll move into today and the sort of landscape of decorative arts, tattoos, design, et cetera. Sure. I mean, the need of humankind as a whole to decorate their bodies has been embedded in humankind ever since the first developments of signs, marks, very early decorations. And apart from jewels and adornments, amongst the body adornments, there was also tattooing. If we want to go back, the very first human remains were tattooed.

3:33Really? And then if we go through, you know, different cultures and different parts of the world, from Egypt to West Africa to Asia, we could find tattooed bodies and tattooed remains. So, and tools with which tattoos were applied. So the need of men to adorn their body also with some sort of rudimental pigments and insertion on the skin of some sort of decorations was ever present. Of course, then it caught up and it got refined. and the big, especially, you know, Eastern cultures like Japan, but also even more Far East in Samoa and Borneo and all. Yeah, the Pacific Islanders. And the Pacific Islands.

4:32They have a very big... And the Maori and they have a very particular... Yeah, very deep spiritual, religious, and not just pure decoration. These decorations were always linked to somehow a supernatural world and culture and a spiritual attitude towards it. What's there is sort of the craftsmanship aspect to it. Obviously, there's the artistry of actually creating recognizable patterns and shapes and figures that we understand on the body. But do you think from the start, there were always kind of crafts people that were turned to apply these things? Or was it perhaps slightly more rudimentary in the early days?

5:15No, no, I mean, I think, and then, as you very beautifully introduced me earlier, it goes back to the need of man to somehow refine its decorative and its artistic skills also through the medium of tattooing. So, of course, what seemed quite crude and rudimental at first became quite refined later, as did all the decorative arts. And so, all different kinds of methods of applying ink on the skin were used up until the very last part of the 19th century, where the electric tattoo machine was invented. So marking quite a before and after kind of technique to apply tattoos and that opened up all sorts of technical innovations.

6:15This is from the technical point of view, from the decorative and from what was applied. Of course, the most iconic, somehow romantic, if you want, imagery was always used. Why a rose had a much more powerful, you know, significance than a daisy? Because a rose brings all those other semantic and and very deep symbology. So why a dragon and not a poodle? Because, you know, so there is, we could stay here for days to dissect what went to become iconic tattoo icons. But there is a reason for everything. Like there's always been for decorative art, which is not just a beautiful ornament, but most of decorative arts were based on wanting to depict something, a story, a certain number, a lot of symbology.

7:22So the world of decorative art, even though it's like the lesser brother of the art art with a capital A, I think in reality, it's an art form that is layered. So it pleases the eye to start with, but then you can peel and peel and peel and find more symbology behind that medusa head by that number of grapes that were used in some other decoration, the number of swirls on a building, the number of whatever you want. So decorative artists always being very careful. The more decorative artists were the original graphic designers. I think... Yeah. Well, that's the interesting thing is that, you know, tattooing predates portraiture and sort of artistry comes through from portraiture and sort of has moved down into kind of contemporary art and obviously you have expressionism and cubism and all these sort of kind of tributaries of art that have drifted away from what was the original sort of form of of of archery which was portraiture but you know even Harold King Harold after the battle of Hastings you know he was identified his body was identified through his tattoos and that of course is an interesting point because people, I think, see tattooing in the context of, you know, back alley shops where you might get an infected needle or like...

8:46Yeah, but let me say something. Yeah. This was the second stage of modern tattooing. Oh, I see. Okay. Because at the very end of the 19th century, tattooing was just for the very high end of society. Okay, that's really interesting. So just the very few, interestingly enough, Sutherland MacDonald, which is the forefather of modern tattooing, of English tattooing, followed by George Burchette after, but most of all Sutherland MacDonald, who allegedly tattooed George V when he was Duke of York. Yeah. I think, I seem to remember that it was, it was a drag, he visited Japan and was very inspired. No, no, but he got the dragon in Japan.

9:34He got it in Japan. The dragon, yeah. Okay, so George V, it's so interesting, because George V was the stamp collecting king, right? He was not a very gregarious, interesting man. He shot a lot of pheasants. I mean, he shot a lot. Apparently, after his coronation, he went shooting for a weekend, and I think they killed three and a half thousand birds. And apparently, his diary entry for the day was, I think we might have taken this a little bit too far. Machine gun. But either way, his big thing was stamp collecting, and he was a strict constitutional monarchist, So, you know, like Elizabeth II, you didn't know much about him, and I definitely wouldn't have expected that he would have been a heavily tattooed man, but he was.

10:10He was. But the interesting fact is that Sutherland McDonald's set up his tattoo shop at number 76 German Street. And in the Turkey, there were Turkish bars back then. They called it the Amman. So it was right in the middle of the fashionable part of town. So dear to us also because of the Gentleman's Club and everything that goes. So that was... Tattooing was considered just for the top part of society. Because... And later on, it got in the 20s and 30s and 40s, the widespread... So it became more accessible. Became accessible and it became into harbors and that part of the city. But actually, to start with, it was in the very heart of St.

11:01James'. Yeah, that's so interesting because even George of his father, Edward VII, who was much more fun. He was a great love. So he had a huge Jerusalem cross on his... Yes, he did. And that's, I mean, amazing that the symbolism of that is quite something interesting. Because tattoos are a mark. Yes. If you commit to a mark underneath your skin, you definitely commit to something that has to have an impact. It's not just a wishy-washy imagery. And so, you know, it's the choice of the imagery is very interesting. The history of the imagery, of tattoo imagery is beautiful. And if you go around in a circle, he always comes back the same, talking about classic tattooing, comes back to the same 20, 25, 30 icons.

11:55Yeah. Reinterpreted, redesigned, redrawn, but always the same. Why? Because they retain a power when worn that other imagery do not possess. Are there any in particular that sort of stand out for you that perhaps carry real significance or symbolism within that world? Well, for my tattooing career, I've always been very keen on two main sources. Oriental imagery for its powerful, iconic message, but also for the highly decorative power they possess, and Western religious iconography, sacred hearts, rosary beads, roses, daggers, and they possess such an iconic, strong message that they became one of my main influences, my main source of inspiration.

13:04And the other thing about you as well that's worth noting is, it's not just the symbols, it's the scale. You have really made your mark by just the scale of the tattoos that you do. Some just that go all the way from the nape of the neck down to the buttocks, I should say. Sure, sure. I would say sort of Yakuza Japanese style. Sure. We came from the late 1980s up until... COVID. Yeah. The world of tattooing has seen its golden age. It's seen a widespread popularity that, hopefully, will come back again, but I think it's probably gonna be unparalleled in the future. Tattooing now has seen more like a commodity.

14:01It became, the business became so widespread that it was good for certain aspects, but definitely it took that cool club feel away. Okay. So, you know, 15 years, up until 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I could recognize someone's work on someone's arm straight away. I could tell who did it. Now that has completely disappeared. Yeah. It's completely disappeared. And I... I mean, going back a bit, one thing that you alluded to was the idea that the symbolism of tattoos is... was always, you know, relevant to the era in which people were and the expression of things like architecture or... You were talking about telephone boxes and post boxes.

14:48They were a certain shape for certain reasons. Sure. Can we talk about that and, you know, people making choices of the tattoos they were getting and how that linked to society at large and the decisions that were being made with regards to, you know, you talk about how you love looking up at buildings because they say so much about the world that they were built in. Sure. I mean, decorative arts is the first form of design and graphic design because it's closer to math than it is to, you know, the art art where you can have the gesture of the painter of the... Everything was quite precise and calculated.

15:29And it went hand in hand throughout the centuries with the need of every society to heavily decorate any aspects of their lives. All this, if you just take the last two centuries, it reached one of its highest peaks during Victorian era where everything was decorated. City landscape was decorated through benches, uh, uh, bollards, street bollards, railings, uh, uh, and then, and then, you know, all these lampposts, the need of decorating went beyond the actual purpose of the actual, yeah, yeah, yeah. So everything, every, every, uh, street bollard was decorated either with the name of the parish or with the City of London.

16:21So the society felt the need to decorate absolutely everything, from knives and forks, china, vases. The idea of cluttering came, richly speaking, in Victorian time, frames, pictures. So even objects that didn't need decoration were highly decorated. Then these transitions, you know, with the Art Nouveau, and then which, and then give way to Art Deco with these clean lines. Yes, exactly. So there was a need to simplify the lines by retaining the highly decorative aspect of it, even though the lines were much more simple. The sheer opulence of the decoration, even in art deco, with the simple line, it was as opulent as you can get.

17:07And then you carried a lot of the art deco lines were carried through the 40s, the 50s, streamlined, and all the beautiful cars and the bodies of the cars were just so round and beautifully connected and streamlined. 60s, 70s, up until the 80s, the world felt the need of decorative elements around. Yeah, it's so fascinating. Like, you think of something as simple as the cantilevered chair. So that was seen as a real icon of the art deco. And... But before, you know, in the Victorian times, everything was like the captain's chair. So it was like, you know, heavily cushioned and, you know, beautiful woodwork and all these sorts of things.

17:49And so it's so funny how things shift in terms of, you know, how much... Not necessarily how much effort somebody's gonna put into it, but, you know, what people see. And it comes down to taste, doesn't it? It's a taste thing, isn't it? Yeah, of course. Of course. It's a reflection of the taste or the other way around. I mean, I don't know who the tastemakers were at the time, but definitely you can define errors by their architecture, their decorative pattern, their aesthetics. But somehow we got to the end of that. And it seems like, I don't want to sound like a man of my age, but we always look back to a time where craft whosed out a lot of skills and the appreciations of those even simple everyday objects goes beyond and it survives through an era now which in my opinion started throughout the 80s where it seems that there's no need for decorate there's no need for beauty there's no need to decorate things there's no there's no an urge to have an embellished anything yes well you know and people don't seem to take any more pleasure in that if you see the way they go about, you know?

19:06So... Nick and I were talking yesterday about the quartz crisis, and how basically the success of the quartz partly was down to the fact that ultimately, in the 80s, or certainly through the 70s, and into the 80s, technology and new techies things, like the synthesizer or whatever, that was, you know, people didn't want grand pianos, they wanted synthesizers. You know, they wanted this new age of things. And so, a court swatch kind of played into that. And I guess it's the same here, is that ultimately, there was that period where, you know, the future was everything. Sci-fi ruled TV and... Absolutely.

19:46Somehow, it seems like that the more need for technology, and we live in an era where we're just dictated by it. Yeah, yeah. It seems that that takes its toll on the beauty of the craftsmanship. Yes, I agree. So it somehow goes in parallel from, you know, one goes up, the other one goes down. When somebody goes in to see you for tattooing, do you find that if somebody is looking to get an impressive tattoo, they are willing to wait for your both guidance and also the space an artist needs to create something, you know, your sketches, and then, you know, just making sure that you get the design.

20:28Sure, sure, sure. So is that a... It's absolutely like bespoke tailoring. It's absolutely like ordering a watch to an independent watchmaker or a pair of shoes. When people get into that frame of mind, the waiting time doesn't become an issue anymore. Yeah. It's just part of the process. It's actually part of the beauty of the process. So there is a constituency for that. There is people who... Yeah, okay, fine. And even because you can't delegate to technology. No. There's nothing you can't delegate to technology. Maybe you can use an iPad instead of pen and paper, but to draft the first draft.

21:03You haven't told ChatGPT to design a tattoo. Or to tattoo it. You're right. That's so true. Yeah. And so, okay, so why don't we talk about that process then, you know, in terms of, let's say somebody comes in and wants something that is not necessarily sort of a full back tattoo, but something that is ornate. Do you advise on, let's say, I know that you love Art Deco, and that you, you know, well, I mean, you have many loves. Do you advise, you know, several options, or do you find that people have a very specific idea of what they want? I mean, what's the dynamic? Well, no, you know, when you establish, I mean, I've been tattooing for many years, and when you establish your name, it's kind of a natural selection.

21:48People come to you because of your aesthetics and you don't need to force them into what you would like to do. They come with a sometimes broad, sometimes not so broad idea, but ultimately they chose you over somebody else because of your style and your aesthetics. The same goes for any other profession, like a tailor or an architect or a painter. Yeah, which for the benefit of people listening or watching, what is that aesthetic? My aesthetic? Yeah. Well, as I said, I'm a big lover of decorative art, so I take my source of inspiration, as far as tattooing is concerned, from many different sources and I've explored many different visual approaches.

22:37But tattooing is quite... It has rules. You can't do exactly what you want and in the scale you want it. There are rules to take into account. It's on the skin, the skin moves, the skin ages. So you have to give lines enough space to breathe and so it goes for the shade and the colour. There's a whole theory. But in terms of iconography, I always pick from the classics. I did many different graphic approaches in my life. It can go from medieval to Renaissance, to a lot of Victorian and William Morris, to some straight line of art deco. It depends on the piece at hand. But mainly I focused basically on a lot of Japanese iconography and Japanese layouts of big pieces.

23:26and Western, call it Western, religious or decorative source of inspiration. So I think as a tattoo artist, I had quite a broad spectrum of offerings. But it was all quite defined by the way I interpreted them. Because, you know, there's so many Koi Carbs you can draw in your lifetime. And so do all the other tattoos around the world. But if you have your take and your taste and you infuse your view on it, every Koi card looks a little bit different. And I'm sure every time I redraw a dragon, it'll be different. It will have a different personality. Yeah. That's the magic of it. Yeah, absolutely.

24:10How many suits can you have? Well. They're all a jacket and a pair of trousers. That's very true. But they all have their personality. Yeah. One thing that you do a lot is you collaborate with luxury brands. Sure. I mean, the takeaway from that for me is that... They see you... It's not just, this guy's a good graphic designer. It's more actually, I think, tattoo artists... have a good steer on... cultural tastes, society, you know, what people are kind of... What they find agreeable, where their tastes are shifting. We've spoken about how, with Art Deco, you know, the taste shifted, I mean, completely on its head.

24:52Um, but designers were able to kind of keep up with that. But with luxury brands, when they want to have product created, they've come to you because they sort of feel like you have a really good steer on what people might enjoy and what might have an impact today. Creating things like the Octo Finissimo for Bulgari or even this, the label for this bottle. Or, you know, you've even created the, you know, watch designs from scratch, not just dials. So, you know, let's talk about that. Well, it was a natural progression. I always thought, I always believed that, you know, I am a, I can't call myself an art.

25:31I mean, I don't know what I am. I am different things, but I applied my vision through my design, my drawing skills and my design skills and tattooing was a medium. So yes, it was the biggest part of my life so far. And it was a phase that went through. Because ultimately, a designer sells his taste. And then if he's also able to convey his taste, because he's also very skillful in drawing and designing, those are more tools that you have in your repertoire. But ultimately, a designer conveys his taste onto different products, projects. And so this started quite slowly, because I felt the need to divert or to apply my aesthetics to other and watches were the first platform that I was asked to perform because I've always been very interested.

26:29I've been a collector. I know a lot of people in the watch industry. One thing I have to say, I'm very grateful. I'm very grateful for all my life because it gave me a job that it's probably a dream to many. but I've always been asked to all the assignments that I had were for products or projects that I was always an avid collector of or very interested in and so I was always on this side of the counter and so when I design something I wear my designer hat but also I'm on a side I have my consumer hat which kind of watch would I like to see according to the brand DNA, what would I like to acquire.

27:15So if you ask me to design something that I'm not very interested in, probably I could do a good design job, but probably I won't infuse it with that extra dedication, that extra attention to how it will perform once out on the market because ultimately we're talking about commercial products. So you got to make sure you pierce through, not just because you designed something beautiful, but if that beautiful design is just a monument to yourself, but it's not wearable, it's not this, it's not that, you got to keep that in mind. So your DNA has to come through because it's inevitable. You designing it by respecting the job at hand is also very important because design is not art.

28:02Design has a functionality to it. The designer must respect that. all the designers throughout history who didn't respect that and just built a monument for themselves, they didn't achieve a great design. They achieved something for themselves, which is not my objective, even because when you work in an industry, for example, the watch industry, where you're asked to do, to work for different brands, you can't just do a moco poletta watch for all of them. They have to be for this brand, for the other brand, for the other brand, for the All this mix requires a lot of study, a lot of mathematical process before the hand, the creative hands starts drawing or sketching out the first few lines.

28:49So it's a process. It's a study. It's not, draw me a couple of lines and let's see what comes out. It's, at least for me, my process of working is very methodical. It's very mathematical. Mm-hmm. And that comes from tattooing. There was no room for error. There's no gesture that you could mimic. You could mimic the artistic gesture, but then you have to reproduce it mathematically. So when I design, whether it's just decorating something that already exists or creating it from scratch, it goes through a very mathematical method of thinking. Then I let my creativity based on that study take over.

29:30Authors say that they like to write about a thousand words a day if they're doing a book. And... I just sort of wondered whether there's an equivalent for something like design. Absolutely. So, do you want to achieve something per day to kind of keep things going? Absolutely. First of all, I have been bombarded with decorative information from an early age. My physical and mental library is huge. My source of inspirations are never-ending. Tell me a bit more about that, the young age inspirations. Well, you know, my dad, in his second part of his career, was an antique dealer, my mama, Taylor.

30:17So, an avid, avid collector, orders of anything. Yes. So, when I came to London, the idea of cluttering was already embedded in me. Yeah, Taylor's are not tidy people. So, minimalist. But was it very... It was never me. But was it very Italian? Very Italian. Okay. Very Italian, also French, also Eastern Europe, because we were going, I remember going with my dad once a month to Eastern Europe to collect furniture and paintings, to buy them and take them to Italy. So, I was always quite subconsciously, as I said, bombarded with imagery. You were soaking up a lot of... A lot of imagery. A lot of stimulus.

30:55It was always lines, lines, imagery, lines. I went law school, so I never thought I was the worst in my class of drawing. Who would have thought that drawing, designing, and painting would become my career? I would have never thought of that. Then I started with tattooing because you needed to be a good draftsman as well as a good tattooer. And then that developed furthermore. But for every project, there is a phase of study where you have to collect your, not just inspiration, but your sources. You need to drop yourself, to submerge yourself into a movie. Somehow, it's always a romantic vintage movie for me.

31:38I don't know why. But it's always Casablanca. Okay. But you submit, so you need to select your few points in history that could inspire you. And then you need to set yourself free from all the rest. And then, so that is the study phase. You need to study a lot. You need to immerse yourself a lot into that. And believe me, jumping from one project, which could be designing a watch from scratch, to an illustration for an oil company, to a brand identity for a hotel, you need to jump into three or four different movie sets every day. And each and every one of them has a source of inspiration, set of rules, vision.