A conversation with Jacob Des.
July/August 2016, conducted via email.
In December of 2014 I was asked to make a list for Swallows and Daggers of five tattooists to watch in the coming year. Three of the five were old friends, folks who I’d been tattooed by for more than half of my life and the fourth was some skinny kid from Ohio who I’d only met once. Without a second thought, I called him one of my five favorite working tattooers.
Jacob Des. (Instagram: @jacobdes Truth and Triumph Tattoo Dayton, OH)
Jacob’s art is unapologetically strange; traditional American style tattooing meets 1950s advertising art with a very large portion of ‘what the hell am I looking at’ thrown in. I’m not sure if he’s even concerned with challenging what’s acceptable for ‘tattoo imagery’ so much as he’s confidently doing his own thing without concern for uniformity. One of my top five favorite working tattoo artists.
In July of 2016, Des and I decided to forgo a standard formatted “Q&A” interview and instead chose to just chat back and forth until BEST INTENTIONS editor Ash told us we’d hit our deadline, eschewing anything resembling cohesiveness in favor of mindless rambling. (more…)