If you spotted an old lady with greying hair on the street, your first thought probably wouldn’t be, ‘I bet she has a tattoo.’
Yet, Naveen Nandakumar, owner of Irezumi, the city’s first professional tattoo studio, says his oldest customer was a 65-year-old lady who got a lotus tattooed on her back. With a studio bereft of the dark elements associated with tattooing, it isn’t tough to believe that Naveen has inked many such unassuming people.
“When I started, people said I was a lunatic,” recollects Naveen. However, he says they’ve been doing well since they opened in 2006. Since Chennai was welcoming of the new phenomenon, the artists who worked there were treated like rock stars. Eight years down the road, Naveen says there are no less than 200 tattoo artists in the city.
“People look at tattooing as a good business,” he says, adding that he knows blacksmiths and real estate agents who’ve turned tattoo artists, as all you need to start tattooing is a tattoo kit. And there’s lots of money to be made out of it. “A good tattoo is never cheap and a cheap tattoo is never good,” he says. This is because an artist who takes his art seriously will never under-price himself.
On average, Irezumi sketches five tattoos a day, but most people who come in have no idea of what they want. To give customers options, the tattoo studio buys designs from artists all over the world. Often, people ask for a simple tattoo with a very nice back story to go with it and sometimes, the most elaborate of tattoos have no story behind them.
“My bread and butter comes from tattooing boyfriends’ and girlfriends’ names,” says Naveen. He often urges his customers to think their choices through because he feels “a tattoo is far more permanent than a spouse or a lover.” Sometimes, people come in with strange tattoo ideas, and he recalls one guy who insisted on tattooing a nude Play boy model on his back.
It isn’t surprising then, that people come in for laser removals and corrections 20 to 30 times a month. He narrates the tale of a woman who had tattooed her lips at a beauty parlour for eight hours to make it pinker. The end result was a small patch of pink at the centre of her lips, while everything else went back to being dark. “I could’ve made it dark again, but that’s not what she wanted,” he explains.
Naveen, who is quite heavily tattooed himself, has an elaborate tattoo on his back that took 29 hours and over six sittings to sketch. His first is of a lion on his right arm, which he got done in Malaysia a few years before he started the tattoo studio.
An industrial engineer with a degree from the United States, Naveen tried his hand at driving a cab, delivering pizzas, waiting tables and telecalling, to earn while he was studying. He changed eight cars in two and a half years, owned a pick-up truck and bought a fishing boat. When asked why he did all this, he simply shrugs and says, “Because I wanted to, because I could.”
It's perhaps this attitude that made him start his own tattoo studio without being bogged down by wondering what people would think or worrying about breaking even.
