Jenna Bouma’s Tattoo Art Is Far Out

Jenna Bouma (aka Slower Black) is a master in hand-poke tattooing. Using the shamisen-bori method – meaning she doesn’t use a machine – she sticks to a black and grey palette, with her style blending together the traditional and the modern.

Honing her craft by practicing first on her friends, she started out by working out of a private loft space in her friends’ apartment. “I was doing it on the down-low, and I was on edge because it wasn’t an official shop,” she told The Great Discontent. It wasn’t until 2012 that she opened her own shop.

“The biggest challenge was that I was unable to get an apprenticeship because there wasn’t anyone who could teach me this form of tattooing,” she says. “Because of that, I literally just tried out a bunch of different methods until it felt right, and then I tweaked it as I went.”

Nowadays, her process is relatively straight forward. “When clients come in, I already have a good idea of what they want, because at that point we’ll have already emailed or talked about it over the phone,” she says. “Then I draw up the design and get the A-OK from the client before making a stencil. Once the stencil is made, I put it onto the person’s skin, and we decide on a placement that they like. Then we make it happen. The setup is clean and sterile, and everything is the same setup as it is with a machine, except for the tools I’m using.”

A palm-sized tattoo usually takes between 1-2 hours, a hand sized one takes 3 hours but back pieces can vary from 22- 40 hours depending on the size, detail, and coverage. Take a look at some of her work in the gallery below:

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Healed lady head on Candace. Thank you!!

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