Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Anna's Tattoo from an Indonesian Adventure

A couple weeks back, you may recall, I was loitering on North 14th Street in Williamsburg, waiting for The Gutter to open so I could celebrate Sailor Jerry's birthday. To pass the time, I talked to a few passers-by about their tattoos. One person I stopped, Anna, had an interesting tree inked on her leg, and was kind enough to share:


Anna credited this to a Bali-born artist named Sontang and told me how she got this on the Indonesian island of Lombok:
"I was travelling ... in Indonesia and I met some people that had heard about him [Sontang]... and decided to go find him. So, it was kind of an adventure in itself, just like finding him ... the directions were like oh, take this boat to this donkey cart and ask for this guy ... I knew I wanted a tree, but I didn't really have a design, so I get to his house and he invites me in for tea and breakfast, and didn't even ask what I was there for, and then eventually was like, Oh, do you want a tattoo? He'd never done a tree before, but he had a garden of bonsai trees ... so we walked through them and talked about the different trees and I pointed out features of different ones that I liked ... He drew a five-minute sketch and then he just did it free hand ... he drew a few marks on my leg with permanent marker and then just did it ... [with] multiple layers of shadowing." 
It's a pretty cool tattoo, and one of those that has an interesting story behind it, as well.

Thanks to Anna for stopping to talk with me and sharing her Indonesian souvenir with us here on Tattoosday!

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1 comment:

RisankVeda said...

Hi...
At first, i want to say thank you to brought Indonesian Tattoo on your blog post. I'm Indonesian. There's many talented tattoo artist here. But unfortunately the Indonesian people's perception about tattoos are still poor. Many of them consider tattoos as something strange, and they still think that peoples with tattoo are bad guys. I hope it'll change.