Today we’d like to introduce you to Mimi-Sama.
Hi Mimi-Sama, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born in Portugal and raised in France, where I also started my tattoo career in 2014. I always had an affinity with drawing, even if I had yet to make it my work before my late 20s, nor did I study art. I come from a family of hard workers where art and craft are more hobbies than anything else. I did many different jobs and started an ambitious career in luxury hotels in Paris before doing a burnout, leading me to question myself about who I was and wanted to be. Almost by chance, I entered a friend’s tattoo shop and quickly decided to dive into this new world.
After an apprenticeship that ended hastily, I didn’t find a place that fit my view on respect of the customer, so I decided to go independent and launch my studio in the 5th district of Paris. After 2 successful years of notoriety and wealth, I needed to grow more artistically. So I decided to sell my shop and started a journey of work and travel that led me to work on 4 continents and in more than 15 countries worldwide (Japan, New Zealand, Germany, Belgium, China, Vietnam, Australia, Canada, Portugal, Belgium, Nepal) I arrived for the first time in the summer of 2021. During that journey, I met countless incredible artists, worked at dozen Tattoo Conventions, and guested in studios. One day I received an offer from the notorious Brucius Xylander from Black Serum in San Francisco.
Please talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned. Looking back, has it been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has been a challenging road. The start was especially rough. As a woman seeking an apprenticeship almost 10 years ago, I had many bad encounters with unscrupulous shop owners, where I was either exploited or mistreated. That was one of the reasons I launched my studio so quickly with less than 1 year of experience—after that, launching your own business is always troublesome. I had to face water disasters in my first months, and of course, I had to build a name for myself and find customers when the competition wasn’t always playing fair; finally, needless to explain how traveling and working in so many countries can be difficult. You have to face the administration (work visas, immigration), local culture (tattoo in itself, and sometimes worst being a female tattooist), and overall just traveling is a challenge sometimes. To give you an example, I worked for 1 year in Tokyo. At that time, it was still illegal to tattoo in Japan, so I was employed officially as a designer. And as a woman, it wasn’t easy to be accepted by other artists. Being tattooed myself, I faced many problems, from going to the bank to the beach with my family. Another challenge was to travel and work as a family, even if it was also a strength. The logistics needed are more complicated, resulting in you having to succeed no matter what! I had to find enough customers for every single guest or convention I did. And being away from the rest of the family and friends can be a burden. But I wouldn’t change a thing; it helped me grow and led me to where I am now. As we say in France, “Life is not a quiet river.”
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For readers who might need to become more familiar, what can you tell them about what you do?
I am a tattooist influenced a lot by Japanese pop culture. I am specialized in manga tattoos. I precise manga and not anime because I base most of my tattoo pieces on manga and not on anime or cartoons, but also because I always specialized in blackwork techniques. I created the Mangala style from my technique background, a mix between ornamental tattoos and manga themes. I take pride in my ability to translate on the skin the emotion and the art of the great artists who have always inspired me. But I also want to add something to the tattoo art, which I can only do. This is why I created that style: the missing gap between the manga tattoo, primarily replicas of existing art, and ornamental that could be too abstract for some people. Besides being an artist, I am also a mom of two, and each pregnancy brings its share of questions and new inspirations. For my firstborn, I decided to immerse myself in my love for Japanese culture, which led me to specialize almost exclusively in manga themes and tattoos. For the last one, I decided to dig into the tradition, and I learned, by myself, again the hand-craving technics of traditional Japanese tattoos. So for 2023, I will add a new style to my craft, and I aim to be the first and best woman tattoo artist of Tebori. I have never been a follower and always wanted to push boundaries. I embrace challenges! That is what I will try to do again with this new step.
We’d like to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you.
I consider myself a lucky person. But to have good luck, you need to create opportunities. So, I believe in good luck, and I don’t. But when I look at all my amazing experiences, the great life I built for myself, and the ones I love, I can only feel blessed and grateful. I also had my share of bad experiences that we can put on account of bad luck. But with time, every experience has a purpose that we might not be able to grasp at the moment. My start, for example, was far from easy and all sunshine in the tattoo industry, but it pushed me to grow faster than others and gave me the confidence and resilience to work everywhere. If good luck were more specific, it would be good encounters, meeting the right persons at the right time. But as I said, you must be on your A-game when those days show up.
Pricing:
- My hourly rate is 500USD/h
Contact Info:
- Website: mimisama.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mimi_sama.tattoo and https://www.instagram.com/mimi_sama.blackwork
