about

From engineer to tattoo artist

Alper Firatli didn't start out as a tattoo artist. Before picking up a machine, he worked as a computer engineer, spending years thinking in systems, structure, and precision. Music came even earlier: he joined his first band at 15, and has been writing, recording, and performing ever since, from small clubs to festival stages, both as a solo artist and with his band, Temas.

Tattooing pulled those threads together. The engineer's discipline shows in how deliberately his pieces are composed, nothing placed by accident, every shape and line considered against the body it sits on. The musician's instinct shows in the rhythm of a piece: where it builds, where it goes quiet, how color enters and exits a composition.

Alper's work moves across abstract, realism, illustrative, brushstroke, and geometric styles, often within the same piece, a photorealistic animal portrait broken up by hard geometric lines, or a loose, expressionist composition anchored by precise structure. His sensibility is contemporary and expressionist at its core, shaped by a long list of artists he follows closely, Rothko above all, alongside Kandinsky, Dalí, Picasso, Miró, Escher, and Goya. All of it filtered through freehand brushstrokes and a tattoo machine.

Outside the studio, Alper continues to paint; studio work built around contrast, organic form against geometry, light against dark and has recently started developing a linocut printmaking practice alongside it. He also continues to write and record music.

He takes on custom work by consultation, and travels regularly as a guest artist in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, with more cities ahead.