A hometown road trip with three ‘brutal’ tattoo artists

Tattoo artists Jonah Slater, Ronan Mal and James Goh are used to travelling for work. Like many contemporary tattooers, they regularly move between cities for guest spots across the globe. But earlier this year, the three friends decided to do things differently. For their project Markings, they travelled together through their home cities of London, Dublin and Glasgow, with photographer Rei Delos-Reyes capturing their journey along the way.

The artists packed everything they needed to tattoo into a car and set off from Slater’s East London studio, Church of England. From there, they drove via ferry to Dublin, unloading beds, equipment and supplies into an empty artist studio in the city centre. After tattooing clients for three days, they travelled further out into the Irish countryside, before crossing the water again and eventually reaching Goh’s studio in Glasgow.

They each approached what they tattooed along the way differently. Mal created designs that pulled from the places they were visiting while Slater stuck to his custom pieces, prioritising bigger projects and longer sessions. “There were a couple of clients who got tattooed by all three of us along the way, which was cool,” says Slater. “And it was the first time I think the three of us had actually spent that much time tattooing simultaneously.”

For each artist, it was a chance to bring the other two into a place they know intimately and which continues to influence their practice today. “We all identify quite strongly with where we’re from, and you can see those influences bleeding into our work,” explains Slater. While their work is distinct from one another, the three share a fascination with Gothic architecture, religious imagery and darker historical references. “I think there’s a shared language between us,” Slater says. “Similar interests, similar references, similar ideas, but we speak that language very differently.”

One place where those shared interests came together was Glasgow’s Necropolis, a Victorian cemetery overlooking the city, filled with mossy headstones and weathered monuments. “Ronan’s work uses a lot of Celtic motifs such as crosses and religious imagery, so he would have been like a kid in a candy shop in the necropolis,” jokes Goh. “All three of us can look at the same thing and take something from it, but what comes out the other end looks completely different,” adds Slater.

In Dublin, Mal returned to some of his earliest encounters with tattooing, recalling finding old tattoo magazines and books at car boot sales and passing Shamrock Tattoo on Crow Street to look at the flash in the window. For him, the trip was about “connecting with the roots”. “So many aspects of modern life pull us away from that, and I think everyone is noticing the profound loss that is coming with it. Tattooing is no different.”

Further out in Wexford, they stopped to visit Mal’s friend and fellow tattooer Ste Murdoch and his wife Molly Mahoney, who live with their family and horses in the Irish countryside. Murdoch tattoos from a trailer beside the stables, something Slater remembers as a “proper little tattoo studio inside”, its walls filled with flash and equipment. “There was something incredibly grounded about what Ste and Molly have built,” he says. “It felt like tattooing for the sake of tattooing: giving people good tattoos, looking after people and being part of a community.”

That sense of community extended to the three artists themselves, caught best by the accompanying film by Rei Delos-Reyes. The friends had worked alongside each other before, but never this closely or for this long. “They work extremely hard, and being around them every day and seeing how they approach work was a masterclass on how to get stuff done,” says Goh. “It’s usually the sweetest people making the most brutal work.”