Piotr Dedl is a Polish tattoo artist that’s based in London. His work has been around for quite some time and he became well known thanks to his love of art and surrealistic work. He’s been tattooing since 2006 and, like several other well-known artists, started his art career with architectural studies. Even as a child he had a strong interest in Horror themes and art. Part of what makes his designs so unique is that he tries to convey some sort of philosophical message with them so that they have a deeper artistic meaning.
Early Career
Dedl has always been artistic. Stealing away and drawing horror characters in secret because of his mother’s censure and thriving in a punk rock scene that encouraged him artistically. His architectural studies were abandoned as soon as he bought his first tattoo machine; he was hooked. In the beginning he struggled to get himself an apprenticeship so he focused primarily on fine artists like Tamara De Lempicka and Salvador Dali. His band mates encouraged him to keep going with tattooing, working for 3 years at home and on paper before working on a collaboration with rising artist Victor Portugal. At the time he’d been tattooing about a year and a half and the experience made him hopeful that his destiny as an artist would be successful. Tofi, another tattoo artist, is also credited in influencing his work.
While he agrees that an apprenticeship is the proper way of doing things most of his style was learned through trial and error as well as asking the right questions from artists he admired. His priority when he started was getting the ink into the skin precisely and properly so it could heal well before moving on to more amazing tattoo designs.
Style
Dedl’s style doesn’t really have a name of it’s own since his work is fairly unique. He started out as a black and gray artist and still most of his works follow that theme. He works with a combination of realism and a dream like insouciance that makes his images flow from one to the other. All of his work is custom and fantasy themed and while he does some color work as well that’s all up to client decisions. In fact, Dedl prefers that his clients have a lot of input on what they want to see so that
he knows the basics of what they want and can simply elaborate on that in his own style.
While much of his work has a dark theme to it it’s actually a reflection on his own thoughts on human life and the nature of good and evil. While there’s a lot more freedom to express this in his drawings being able to do so in skin always makes him happy.
As a rule Dedl stays pretty busy, but you’re likely to catch him at any number of conventions around the world. For wisdom, he believes that young artists should follow their dreams and keen asking questions of any artist they can so they can learn. Primarily he want them to focus on creating a good tattoo in skin and worrying about their art on paper before trying to combine the two.
