Milan Tattoo Convention 2016: Three Days, One Massive Project, and a Personal Record
The next convention I want to talk about is the Milan Tattoo Convention in 2016.
It was my first time there, and I arrived with some pretty serious ambitions.
At that point in my career, I was obsessed with pushing myself. I wanted to work bigger, faster, and harder. So we came up with this unofficial idea of trying to set our own kind of world record: who could complete the biggest tattoo project during the convention in the shortest amount of time.
There was no official application and nobody from Guinness World Records there to document it, so technically, no world record was ever registered.
But for us, the challenge was real.
It became a friendly competition between Jack Connolly, Stepan Negur, and me, Andrey Kolbasin.
Three Artists, Three Massive Projects
Everyone chose something ambitious.
Jack Connolly covered an entire torso with black-and-gray wolves and dark Gothic imagery. It looked incredible.
Stepan Negur worked on a full back piece in an organic style using black and red.
And I decided to go even bigger with the area I wanted to cover.
Over the three days of the convention, I tattooed my client's entire back, buttocks, and the backs of his thighs.
The central part of the composition was a triptych featuring three female portraits shown from different angles. The portraits covered the back and wrapped around the waist.
Below them, I created a skull divided into two halves, with one half continuing onto one leg and the other half onto the opposite leg.
The entire project was done in black and gray.
It was a lot of work.
Two Days of Almost Nonstop Work
I honestly did not relax much during that convention.
I barely ate. I barely slept.
Most of the time, I was thinking about one thing: am I actually going to finish this?
The project was serious, and I had put a lot of pressure on myself.
My client, Andreas, traveled from Linz, Austria, and he handled all three days like a warrior.
Most of the tattoo was completed during the first two days. On the third day, we worked for maybe another 20 minutes.
That was intentional.
The final day of a convention is usually shorter, and there is also the competition schedule to think about. I really wanted to complete almost everything within two days instead of depending on those last few hours.
And somehow, we did it.
The project came together.
It Was Never Really a Battle
None of us ended up in the Guinness World Records.
Maybe someday we will try something like that again.
But over time, my priorities changed.
Back then, a lot of the excitement came from seeing how much work we could do in a short period of time. Today, I care much more about how good the final result can be.
Jack, Stepan, and I were friends and colleagues. We are still on good terms today.
There was never any real war between us about who was the best.
It was friendly competition.
We did not even sit down beforehand and officially decide that we were going to compete. It just happened naturally.
All of us had something in common. We worked with realistic imagery, we liked large projects, and we were capable of covering a lot of area in a relatively short period of time.
That naturally created a little competition between us.
But there was always respect.
One of the Strongest Conventions in the World
At that time, Milan was one of the strongest conventions in the world.
You could not simply book a booth and show up.
Artists were invited, or they participated as part of selected studios.
I attended as part of a studio from Wels, Austria, together with other artists from the team.
For me, just being there was already a huge achievement.
I was still in my early twenties, and suddenly I had the opportunity to show my work alongside some of the biggest names in the industry.
There were young artists who were already incredibly talented, and there were older masters who had become legends.
The overall level was insane.
Hundreds of Entries in a Single Category
Competition in Milan was brutal.
There were so many strong pieces that some categories could attract hundreds of artists.
You might have 200, sometimes even several hundred people trying to enter the same category.
And not everyone was even accepted for judging.
Our project was selected.
The judges looked at it, gave us positive feedback, and the work received attention, but we did not finish in first, second, or third place.
Of course, at that age I wanted to win everything.
I wanted the biggest project, the strongest result, the most impressive award.
Everything had to be the biggest and the best.
So naturally, I wanted a trophy.
But looking back, simply being selected and competing at that level was already incredibly important for me.
I felt like I had entered the international community.
I was able to stand in the same room and present my work next to artists I had looked up to.
That experience became another step forward in my career.
Milan Was Inspiration Everywhere
There was another reason Milan meant so much to me.
Italy has an incredible relationship with art.
When you think about the history of European painting, sculpture, architecture, and realism, so much of it leads back to Italy.
Caravaggio. Leonardo da Vinci. Michelangelo.
These are the artists whose work continues to influence people hundreds of years later.
And realism has always been one of the directions closest to me.
So I tried to experience the city outside the convention too.
After work, my colleagues and I went to restaurants, visited museums and exhibitions, and walked through Milan.
The weather was cooler than the image people usually have of Italy. Milan is in the north, and the convention took place during a colder part of the year. It was often cloudy and gray.
I probably expected a little more Italian sunshine.
But you put on a warmer jacket and keep walking.
There was still so much to see.
The Milan Cathedral Stayed With Me
The place I remember most is the Milan Cathedral.
I returned there more than once.
You walk out of the subway and suddenly this enormous building is right in front of you.
The scale is difficult to describe.
You look at the architecture, the sculptures, the religious imagery, the saints, angels, and all those details created by artists generations ago.
For me, that was incredibly inspiring.
Religious art has always been one of my favorite subjects.
I am a believer myself, so I do not look at those images only from a technical perspective. There is also something personal there for me.
I could stand there looking at work created hundreds of years ago and think about the artists who made it.
The same thing happened in museums.
You see works from completely different periods and realize that people were solving the same artistic problems 500 or 600 years ago: composition, light, anatomy, emotion, storytelling.
That always pushes me to make my own work better, more interesting, and fresher.
Then My Client Had to Fly Home
There was one more thing I kept thinking about after finishing the project.
My client had to get home.
We had just tattooed his back, buttocks, and the backs of his legs.
And now he had to sit on an airplane.
I remember thinking, how is this guy going to fly home?
How is he going to sit down?
How is he even going to use the bathroom comfortably?
It is a huge amount of freshly tattooed skin, and healing something that large requires a lot of discipline.
But I have great clients.
Andreas handled it properly.
He followed the healing process, took care of the work, and everything healed beautifully. The piece did not require any major correction afterward.
That was the best possible result after such an intense project.
And the story did not end in Milan.
Later, Andreas traveled to other conventions with this same piece and won awards with it.
So even though we did not leave Milan with first, second, or third place, the project continued its life after the convention.
For me, that makes the whole experience even better.
What Milan Gave Me
Milan was one of those trips that stayed with me for a long time.
I arrived as a young artist with huge ambitions, trying to prove how much I could do in three days.
I worked almost nonstop, barely slept, worried about whether I would finish, and competed at one of the strongest events I had ever attended.
We did not set an official world record.
We did not win the competition.
But I completed one of the biggest projects I had attempted at that point in my career, showed my work among some of the strongest artists in the world, and learned a lot from simply being there.
And outside the convention, I got to experience Milan, its museums, its architecture, and centuries of art that still inspire my work today.
At the time, I wanted everything to be bigger, faster, and stronger.
Years later, I look at it differently.
Speed can be exciting.
But quality is what stays.
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