One of the strangest things about building this archive has been realising how long it actually takes to look at somebody’s work properly.

Not just scrolling past a tattoo and thinking “this is nice” or “this looks clean,” but actually sitting with it for more than a few minutes and zooming in until you can see where the line weight changes, whether the black has healed patchy, whether the white highlights were placed carefully or just added everywhere because they look good on Instagram initially. Aakanksha and I started doing this almost unconsciously after a point. Every few days we would sit together, open another round of portfolios and start zooming in on healed work like two slightly unhinged forensic analysts.

We started noticing everything.

How some artists understood the body and some didn’t. How certain tattoos sat on skin naturally while others looked almost pasted onto the arm. Which artists knew how to work with darker skin tones without muddying the design. Which artists were overworking the skin. Which artists clearly cared about healing photographs. Which artists had developed an actual visual language instead of reproducing the same Pinterest references over and over again.

I think before this project I understood tattooing emotionally first and technically second. Now I don’t think those things can be separated anymore.

Because technical precision changes the emotional experience of being tattooed too. You can feel when somebody is careful with your body. You can feel when somebody respects the permanence of this craft.

What people don’t really see when they look at a finished project like this is how unstable the process actually was while we were inside it. The “100” kept changing constantly. Artists dropped out midway through interviews. Some disappeared after confirming participation. Some needed extensions because they were travelling or tattooing full-time or emotionally burnt out. Some sent answers months later. Even last week we were still adjusting names and figuring out who the final hundred actually were.

At one point I remember feeling slightly insane because I had spent months speaking to artists every single day and still felt nowhere near “done.” There are so many moving parts inside a project like this. There’s us, and a 100 artists. There’s the designer. There are interview transcripts, layout revisions, follow-ups, printing conversations, screenshots, image folders, scheduling calls, missing consent forms, delayed responses and hundreds of voice notes slowly accumulating across phones and drives. There's picking designs to be printed.

And yet I think that instability also became part of the archive itself because contemporary tattoo culture in India is unstable right now in a way that feels exciting. Everything is shifting very quickly. Artists are leaving traditional studios. More queer and gender-diverse artists are building private spaces. Handpoke has expanded massively. Younger artists are developing styles online before entering formal studio systems at all. People are teaching themselves through Instagram, mutuals, DIY kits and shared knowledge instead of old apprenticeship structures alone.

So the process of building this book never really felt clean or academic despite how organised we initially tried to make it.

It felt emotional and repetitive. Occasionally overwhelming but mostly just genuinely beautiful. 

I, personally, loved learning about tattooing from every single person who answered our questionnaire. Regardless of whether they're in the final 100. I'm even more sure in wanting to become a tattooer myself. 

I also think it’s important to say that reducing this project to a final “100” was emotionally difficult in ways I didn’t anticipate initially because every single person who filled out our forms or spoke to us had already contributed something important to the landscape of tattooing in India simply by existing inside it.

We received close to 200 completed entries and had over 280 conversations while building this archive. Some were with artists who had been tattooing for barely three years. Some had spent decades doing this work. Some worked out of highly visible studios in major cities. Some were tattooing quietly from smaller towns where they were still one of the only women visibly practicing professionally.

There are artists in this archive from places people rarely associate with contemporary tattoo culture at all. Moradabad ,Nagpur ,Kochi are some of them. Smaller cities where women and gender-diverse tattoo artists are still building practices against enormous social resistance while simultaneously trying to be taken seriously as technical professionals.

And honestly, there were moments where selecting only 100 people felt almost impossible because the ecosystem itself has become so much larger than most people realise.

We weren’t only looking for “good tattoos.” We were looking for artists who had developed a relationship to tattooing that felt intentional. Artists whose work showed care for clients and tattooing. Artists who understood permanence and respected that someone was inevitably carrying THEM through their lives, not just THEIR art. Artists who were building visual languages of their own instead of endlessly reproducing trend cycles.

At the same time, we were also thinking constantly about representation in a way that felt deeper than tokenism. We wanted different generations of tattoo artists speaking to each other inside the same archive. We wanted somebody who learned through traditional community practices existing alongside somebody who taught themselves through Instagram during lockdown. We wanted machine artists beside handpoke artists. We wanted queer artists, older artists, artists from smaller cities, artists building private studios out of apartments, artists who had quietly become the first visible woman tattooer in their region without anybody really documenting what that meant.

Because history matters too, their stories and craft matters. 

I don’t think people fully understand how unprecedented this is within the Indian context. There has never really been a large-scale archive that says plainly: these women and gender-diverse tattoo artists exist, their practices are serious, their work deserves documentation, and they are actively reshaping what Indian tattoo culture looks like in real time. And I know that responsibility sat with us throughout the entire process.

Not just to create something visually beautiful, but to create something honest enough to hold the scale of what is actually happening right now.

There are artists whose portfolios I think I could recognise instantly now because we spent so many nights looking through them repeatedly while debating selections. There are tattoos I remember more clearly than conversations I had that same week. There are interviews I still think about randomly while travelling or trying to sleep.

I don’t think either of us realised in January that this project would end up consuming such a huge portion of our lives for months.

But I also don’t think either of us understood, at that point, how many people across the country were already quietly building this ecosystem alongside us.

What part of this book sounds most exciting to you? Tell us in the comments!