People trust me with something they can never take back.

I was born in Luoyang, China. When I was nine my parents moved us to Canada. They're both engineers, they were just starting their forties, and it was the biggest jump of their lives. I didn't understand how brave that was until I was much older.

People expect the culture shock to be the hard part. For me it was the opposite. School in China was heavy. Canada gave me time. That time is the whole reason I became an artist. For the first time in my life I had room to just make things.

My grade six teacher is the one who started it properly. Not by telling me I had talent. By showing me that you just learn how to do a thing, and then you do it. The joy is in the doing. All these years later, I'm still that kid.

I got into OCAD and left in second year. I was broke, I wasn't motivated, and deep down I knew staying wasn't going to save me. With two engineer parents, I walked in expecting to make zero money from art anyway. So leaving didn't feel like losing much.

What I didn't see coming was how bad the next years would get. Social media was good to other people. It put me somewhere I couldn't handle. I've always felt things really, really strongly, and for a while the inside and the outside were both bad at the same time.

I spent two years doing a lot of drugs, and two more in a depression deep enough that I assumed I was just waiting to die. I came out of it. Tattooing is a lot of the reason why.

Honestly, at first it was just another drug. It was the one I had left. But something else caught me. Painting had stopped being hard for me. Tattooing was something I was genuinely bad at. That gap between what I could see in my head and what my hands could do is what hooked me. I've been closing it ever since, and it never fully closes. That's the good part.

I opened my own shop young and it grew fast. Within a couple of years we were doing over a million a year. I was a kid. I made a lot of mistakes, I overworked, and I lost friends I still miss.

The worst mistake was quieter than that. I started planning my life around money. How much, and then how much more. I forgot the thing that got me out of the dark in the first place. And then it all came apart. The business, most of the people around me. I couldn't tell you which was worse, the depression or the collapse. While they were happening they felt the same.

But it needed to happen. I was going the wrong way and I think my body knew before I did. Now, looking at it, I don't even call it failing. It's what turned me around.

While I was rebuilding, my mother got sick. Cancer. That's where I am right now, and it's made me grow up faster than anything else ever has.

Being with her, I've seen how much of a life goes to regret. Being scared of the things that actually mattered. Money was her escape too, saying we don't have enough when we already did. I can't judge her for it. I did the same exact thing with the shop.

Time doesn't stop and we die. The minute I actually understood that, everything got simple. I'm going to hurt no matter what I choose, so only right now counts. It was never about the outside stuff. I have to love the life I'm in, and art is most of it. I'm not turning away from it again.

When I paint, I do whatever I want. A canvas has no consciousness. It doesn't have to live with my decisions.

A person does. They wear it for the rest of their life, whether or not they chose well. Removal exists, but it's painful, it's slow, it's expensive, and for most people with real lives to worry about it's not really an option. If I do bad work, I don't pay for it. The person wearing it pays, every single day, for decades.

That's the whole reason I work the way I do. It's not caution. I just know exactly who carries the cost.

Tattooing is ancient and most of what it meant is lost. What survives is the mechanism: pain, permanence, a decision you can't walk back, and a mark that changes how people read you.

And the world does read you. However you describe yourself, the world reads it and answers. That happens whether you got the piece for yourself or for somebody else's eyes. So my job isn't to put a nice image on your arm. My job is to make sure the thing being said is true, and that it's said well.

This is where most of the power gets wasted. Placement usually gets treated as layout. Where does it fit, does it look balanced. It's not layout. It's meaning, and your body decided a lot of it before you ever walked in.

The inner arm is a place we hide and protect. It belongs to the people closest to us. Things go there that you don't owe the world an explanation for.

The forearm is the opposite. You see it constantly and so does everyone else. It starts conversations whether you wanted them or not. So whatever goes there has to be something you're happy to be recognised for. And it has to be true, because you're going to look at it every day for the rest of your life.

The shoulder is armour. It's a place that makes people feel strong. What belongs there is whatever protects you. Family, someone you've lost, the reason you're still standing.

None of this is hard. It's just mostly ignored. But meaning is the smaller half of a tattoo.

The meaning gets people in the door. The composition is what makes the piece. How it sits on the body, how it balances it, how it moves. It matters more than what's in the piece. That's the whole game.

A body isn't divided, it moves. A sleeve isn't a top half and a bottom half, it's many pieces that have to travel together. I start at the joints. How to cross them, how to lead into the next section. Nothing gets cut off at a joint unless cutting it there is deliberate and makes the piece better.

And composition describes you way more than you think. A piece that's very put together, follows every muscle, darks spread out evenly, reads as square and solid. Which works if that's you. But if that's too much you, and secretly you're the opposite, we go the other way. A little messier, higher contrast, so it feels bolder. Overlays might be too brave for an office worker and just right for an artist. There are looks we can rock, and most of that is decided by composition.

The way I explain it is a song. Composition is the melody. Meaning is the lyrics. The realism, the fine line, all the difficult technique, that's the production. All three have to be there. But you feel the melody first.

I aim for a soul inspiring melody with the deepest lyrics, and still easy to read. Anyone can understand it, just at different levels. If somebody decides to go deep, they can.

I want a piece to take time after time after time to keep revealing deeper meanings, years after, especially as life unfolds for the person wearing it. What if I can put all the wisdom in there. What if I can understand someone's soul so deeply that every time they meet their soul in life, every time they finally realise who they are and what life means, they find it in their tattoo. A layer they hadn't seen yet.

I don't know if I even can. But it excites me so much. I want to dedicate my life to making this happen. Slowly I will get there.

That's the rule, for both of us. If I'm not excited about the piece, I don't book it. If you're not, we keep working.

So design sessions run as long as they run, and they're free. One ran three years before we put anything on skin. That was the right call. Three years of thinking costs nothing next to the wrong piece.

I can be stubborn. I'll work with you on a design for as long as it takes, but I don't back down on something I think matters for the piece. And I might quote you forty hours for a sleeve and take a hundred and twenty. That's why I charge per piece instead of per hour. The extra time is mine to pay for, not yours. You pay in time and in pain.

I think I've unlocked maybe half of what this can do. I've watched somebody who could never hold eye contact walk out carrying themselves like a queen. I've seen the edges of it. I'm still learning the rest.

A body moves. A body feels. A body falls in love and has children and falls down and gets back up. A body cries at a bedside while its mother is dying.

Everything I've ever put on someone is there for all of it. It goes where they go. It gets rained on, held, grieved over, grown around. Making that piece as well as I possibly can is the thing that makes tomorrow feel survivable. I know it won't always be. But as long as I have this, I have a soul. It's what I can give. It's what kept me alive.