A few years ago someone emailed me: “Would it be OK if I got your kissing piece tattooed on my chest?” “Sure” I replied. A few months later he emailed me this photo.

This weekend is the first edition of Tilburg Ink, part of the Incubate Festival for independent culture.

In the tattoo world, the one who handles the needle is considered the artist. From the perspective of the fine arts this is a unique situation because the ‘tattoo artist’ merely makes a copy of an already existing image. Ten contemporary artists such as Ronald de Bloeme, Marc Bijl, Rafael Rozendaal and Thomas I’Anson will create their own designs for tattoos. This collection will be presented in the traditional way, on so-called “flash sheets”. Incubate will distribute these to tattoo shops throughout the Netherlands. This project will theoretically create an infinite number of copies of these artist’s works.