Joel Brewer-Have Fun Be Lucky Tattoo-U.S.

Joel Brewer gets creative with his line-work in his tattoos and takes a heavy influence from the giants of the American Old School style. The vibrancy of his colours, and often obscurely sexual nature of his subject matter, give Joel a unique tattooing style that is full of juxtaposed images that jump out at you the closer you look.

There is a playful simplicity in the composition of his pieces that is well placed with the detail of the tattoos themselves. His Japanese geisha gently fans herself and looks over her shoulder in a traditional pose, but her fan is delicately painted and she wears bizarre-looking pins in her hair that falls in wisps around her head. She also has a metal head-plate that seems like a protective helmet of some kind, even though she is in the seduction trade. This curious and humourous contrast of objectives is exactly the kind of point you can expect to be made from Joel in his work. A beautiful Medusa head has a similar oddness to it, as her attractiveness almost distracts from the deadliness of the snakes that coil around her head. Her pink cheek blush has been shifted to include her eyes, and the absence of her eye-balls reminds the viewer of the curse that turned the Greek heroes to stone.

Joel clearly enjoys working with strong colours, and particularly within the graffiti style. A ski gondola is covered with some great waves of colour and is closely reminiscent of street art. The dawn emerging behind it must have had a particular resonance with his client, reminding anyone who loves the snow of fresh tracks first thing in the morning. There is a strong sense of excitement in the pinks and yellows above the lift. Another image of a man being electrocuted in the graffiti style shows an over-proportioned head and wide eyes that give it a cartoon-like feel. There are some great colours used to describe the shock of the jolt, and the green-ness of his eyes contrast beautifully with the electric yellow halo around his head. The fun is found in the detail, with his clawing fingernails and the electrodes attached to his wrists.

You can find surrealism not only in his fine art paintings, but also in his tattoos. There is a particularly weird and wonderful design of a squid or octopus sitting on the head of a robot, in a country landscape with a windmill in the background. Here his line work is not as strong as before and could almost be a painted image, and the colours he's chosen are more subdued. In choosing such gentle colour tones he has made the subject matter even stranger because it's not trying to come across as something sci-fi, but perhaps an image you could expect to see in real life.

Joel seems to appreciate a sense of humour in his work, and loves to create grown-up tattoos for his clients while not forgetting the importance of a playful character. His palette is given free reign, but he is as careful about the selection of great colour contrasts as he is for the impact it will have on the subject matter. Whether you're looking for something funny and bizarre, or old school or surreal, Joel with offer up a tattoo that will stand up next to the great artists of tattooing today.