Ask Here Part Two

With the release of Tattooing Ask Here—a collection of original and traditional flash, interview, stories and photographs detailing the tattoo history of Felix Leu—we took the spectacularly well-timed opportunity to speak to Loretta Leu about the book and her life with Felix. The following concludes our time well spent…

1978 is a crucial year in your life : Felix has the revelation about tattooing in Yugoslavia ; he learns the basics of tattooing with Jock, an old-timer in London who accepted to teach him and then, after 6 months of “apprenticeship”, all the family leaves, Felix with a bit of a material to start tattooing, to Goa, India. Why that fast and why that far?

First of all, life was very cheap there, and it was also a good place for kids to grow up in. But the main reason was that Goa had a steady stream of travellers passing through it, Westerners who would come there for 2 weeks, one month… people like us. So Felix thought that was a good place to go and tattoo. We didn’t have a lot of work in the beginning, maybe one or two tattoos a week. But because life was cheap—we could even afford two maids in this big 10-room house we rented—and with some money, we had saved in Europe we knew that we could last for a few years. There were just a few tattooers there at the time; we became friends with Gippi Rondinella from Rome and Paco el Vasco, a nomadic tattooer. There was also an Indian tattooer, Soma, who worked in the market in the town of Mapsa and in the weekly hippie flea market.

How could you be sure that this stream of people would become a clientele?

Because of that village in Yugoslavia, come on! It’s true that tattooing was not so popular with hippies until Janis Joplin got her bracelet and little heart from Lyle (Tuttle, tattooer from San Francisco). It was not a big thing in the hippie scene. There were not so many people tattooed when we arrived. But there were travellers, freaks—which is a bigger name for the whole thing; hippies is a certain niche label, “freaks” includes everyone who thinks differently, people who don’t follow the mainstream. Because we were the same as our clients in a way, it worked!