I don't think either me nor Aakanksha understood what "finding 100 artists" actually meant when we started this project in January.

At the time it sounded manageable. We had a rough list of names, a spreadsheet, a designer, and what felt like a fairly straightforward brief: document 100 women and gender-diverse tattoo artists from across India. The assumption was that most of the work would happen after we found the artists. The interviews, the writing, the layouts, the production.

Instead, the search itself became the project.

For the better part of six months,  I have lived inside Instagram DMs, spreadsheets, intake forms, follow-up emails, voice notes, portfolio reviews and increasingly chaotic conversations about whether a particular artist belonged in one section of the book or another. We have sent well over 280 messages and spoken to nearly 200 artists. We have had artists disappear halfway through interviews, reappear three weeks later, send answers from conventions, airports and hospital waiting rooms, and in some cases drop out entirely after months of conversations, forcing us to begin the search again. I let my tears fall every now and then with each dropout, with the pressure of telling these stories right, or telling them at all y'know? 

Even now, while writing this, the list has only recently settled.

And somewhere during that process, the project became much bigger than we expected.

Because once you start looking seriously, you begin finding tattoo artists everywhere.

Not just in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi, where most conversations about Indian tattooing tend to stay, but in Kochi, Moradabad, Nagpur, and smaller cities where artists are quietly building careers, opening studios, teaching themselves, experimenting with styles and creating communities without necessarily receiving the same visibility as artists working in larger metropolitan centres.

Some of the artists we spoke to have been tattooing for over two decades. Some started during lockdown. Some work from private studios. Some work from home. Some travel constantly. Some are preserving traditions of handpoke tattooing or particular regional styles. Others are creating visual languages that feel entirely contemporary.

What surprised me was not how different everyone was. It was how difficult it became to reduce any of them into neat categories. Despite being who I am, this became a hard pill to swallow since we also had to look at various reasons of why we wanted to categorise them at all– we needed to break down a 100 artists to bits of information for social media, for our blogs, maybe even for the layouts. 

Every time we thought we understood what we were looking for, another artist would appear and complicate the criteria.

A technically brilliant fine-line artist from a major city would be followed by somebody handpoking extraordinary work from a smaller town. An artist with thousands of followers would be followed by somebody whose work was just as strong but existed almost entirely through word-of-mouth. Somebody with a pristine private studio would be followed by somebody working out of a shared apartment space whose healed tattoos stopped us in our tracks.

So the conversations around selection became much more nuanced than we initially imagined.

Of course we were looking at technical execution. We spent an embarrassing amount of time zooming into healed tattoos trying to understand line consistency, saturation, colour choices and how different artists approached South Asian skin. We looked at whether white highlights were being used intentionally. We looked at composition and placement. We looked at whether a tattoo felt considered beyond the stencil itself.

But we were also looking for something harder to define. Like–

• A point of view.

• A relationship to the craft.

• Evidence that an artist was building something distinctly their own– albeit in the technical sense with style, or environmentally, or even how they approach art and their community. 

Because this was never intended to be a ranking of the "best" tattoo artists in India, that would be impossible. There are too many incredible artists, and every week of this project seemed to introduce us to ten more.

What we wanted instead was to build a snapshot of a community that rarely gets documented at this scale.

A record of artists working across generations, geographies, tattooing styles and lived experiences.

A record of women who opened studios when there were very few women doing so, of queer and gender-diverse artists building practices outside traditional structures, and of traditional practitioners whose relationship to tattooing predates contemporary studio culture altogether.

Most importantly, we wanted to create something that future artists could find. Future artists like me. I have dreamed of being a tattooer since I was 15 or 16, this book or rather working on it has been an education of the finest kind. I entered this project loving tattoos, feeling incredibly curious about each artists’ process and journey, but maybe also a little naive on what it actually meant to work on and publish a book. However with most artists, the larger, more important conversations happened around life, not tattooing itself– but the process of getting there, what tattoos do for individuals, for queerness and dysphoria, fear of failure, and the shackles that have been placed on females for far too long. 

Because one of the strangest parts of this project has been realising how invisible so much of this history remains. There are artists doing remarkable work in cities most people would never think to look at. There are artists carrying decades of experience whose stories have never been formally documented. There are younger artists currently building careers who have never seen themselves reflected in archives, books or industry histories before. Yet, they converge in our attempt to tell different stories. 

I've written before about how I love my novels, and stories. I love history and people and observing human behavior and betty boop tattoos, and the gays–  Anomalie feels like the perfect vessel to share this story with the world. We want to bring to light the work of underrated artists, artists from the subcontinent, those who don't get the kind of interaction and visibility that an Art by Sehgal might despite controversy. 

I have benefited greatly from every single interaction with every artist. This is a collection of 100 lives and their stories, of artists who have authored their own fates. We’re grateful and excited to share them with the world. 

This book began as a search for 100 people.

Somewhere along the way, we have found every anomaly to what the patriarchy, or society wants from women and gender diverse folk. We found our nonconformists, we found a community that is far larger than our archive.

Do you think its important to archive and record artists' work? What other ways can we  all use to preserve modern Indian art and culture?