Have You Heard of the Brutal Black Project?

Tattoo-lovers: you are due for an awakening.

So much of tattoo culture is bubblegum, plastic meaninglessness. A celebrity gets a tiny tattoo of a pink cat on their ankle, and everybody screams about how cute it is. What happened to the jet-black ink, the taboo, and the tribal origins of tattoos?

Enter The Brutal Black Project

There was a time when tattoos were a right of passage, a kind of ritual magic that endowed the tattoo’d with the marks of adulthood and maturity. I’m talking stick and poke, and incisions with the blood wiped away and ink poured right back in.

I’m not a tattoo artist but I am wow’d by what the Brutal Black Project represents: a revolt against today’s trivial understanding of the tattoo art form.

Cammy Stewart and Valerio Cancellier originally connected online, commiserating about how tattoo ritual had lost its meaning. They were both tattoo artists, and they saw this firsthand, time and again. So, they decided to do something about it.

They allotted a small portion of their time to the project; maybe two weeks twice a year. They set up shop in Italy and began offering free sessions to anyone who wanted to undergo their ritual of brutality.

“No compassion. No scruples. No empathy.”

This ritual is about pain. It’s about transcending the body and going beyond your furthest limits.