the tattoo writer

• Akimitsu Takagi

the tattoo writer is a research project based on photographs taken by the Japanese writer Akimitsu Takagi (1920-1995) of the tattoo milieu in Tokyo in the 1950s.

Akimitsu Takagi (1920-1995) was one of the greatest Japanese crime writers of the 20th century. Crazy about tattooing, he entered this underground scene and documented it with his medium format camera. In the Japanese capital, he photographed the greatest tattoo artists of the time, their clients and their tattoos, thus constituting an archive of his time that is as rare as it is unedited.

For this edition, the photographs in the book were scanned from the original negatives. These old documents are almost 70 years old and although they arrived in an exceptional state of preservation, they have been specifically cleaned and restored.