Tattooist Turned Jeweller: My Story

I'm a tattooist turned jeweller — though "turned" isn't quite right. I still tattoo. Jewellery came alongside it, not instead of it.

I went straight from a degree in illustration into tattooing. Alongside that I was doing screen printing, bookbinding, illustration work of every kind — I'd always had a pencil in my hand. Drawing came naturally to me from a young age, and tattooing was just the next place to put that.

The Pause I Never Planned For

Then COVID happened, and tattooing was one of the last industries allowed to reopen. For the first time in years, I had time I hadn't planned for and would probably never get again — what I think of now as sacred time.

I'd already been making jewellery as a hobby on the side. With that unexpected stretch of time, I pushed into it properly: built a website, researched everything I could find on jewellery and jewellery design, and didn't really stop. I was waking up thinking about it and going to sleep thinking about it.

Why It Didn't Feel Like a Reinvention

From the outside, a tattooist turned jeweller sounds like a reinvention. From where I was standing, it barely felt like one.

Both start the same way: a consultation. The client has something in their head, I have something in mine, and the job is finding where those meet — while knowing the tolerances of what's actually possible, in skin or in metal. I'd always loved that technical side of tattooing, and jewellery design has the same engineering problem at its centre, just solved with different tools.

The craft itself transfers too. Tattooing is small, hand-intricate work, done close and precise. Jewellery — whether I'm sketching a design or at the CAD machine refining it down to fractions of a millimetre — asks for exactly the same thing. Taking it on was an easy jump, because it wasn't really a jump at all.

One Family

I don't really separate it out in my head — tattooing, drawing, ink, metal. It's all the same family of making things by hand. Jewellery became a sideline to creativity under the umbrella of art — I still do both, and The Illustrated Jeweller is just where a lot of that creative energy has landed.

If you want to see where that craft goes next, take a look at how a bespoke piece gets made, or book a consultation and we'll start with exactly that same conversation.