The Brooklyn-based tattoo artist has built an international practice on a radical premise. Clients bring feelings, not mood boards, and he does the rest.
There’s a running joke in the creative industries about the dream client. The one who turns up with a vague but genuine emotional impulse, says something like “I trust you”, and then gets out of the way. For most designers, illustrators and art directors, it’s a myth. For Travis Fountain, it’s a Tuesday.
Travis is a Brooklyn-based tattoo artist who works exclusively in monochrome, producing surrealist compositions that look less like tattoos and more like stills from films yet to be made.
His pieces are dense with narrative: figures wading through cracked landscapes, skeletons framed by clockwork suns, solitary bodies perched in thorned branches. They feel pulled from some private mythology that only the wearer fully understands. And that’s more or less how they come into existence.
The brief is a feeling
His clients don’t typically arrive with Pinterest boards. They come with a core memory, a song lyric, a half-formed feeling they can’t shake. From there, Travis takes over entirely.
He sketches by hand (no iPad, no Procreate, no generative AI shortcuts), and builds a fully original composition rooted in his own visual vocabulary. This is unusual in an industry that trades heavily in reference and iteration. It’s also the kind of authorship most working creatives spend their careers trying to earn.
What makes this even more interesting is Travis’s background. He came to tattooing from engineering, which perhaps explains the structural precision in his work; the way light behaves across his pieces feels engineered rather than approximated. His shading draws on chiaroscuro painting and photographic lighting, and the results sit somewhere between graphite illustration and concept art. The technical fluency is obvious, but it never overwhelms the storytelling.
16 countries, no presets
Travis has tattooed in 16 countries, building a recognisable style that travels well because it doesn’t depend on trends. His visual language is his own. There’s no flash sheet, no menu.
Every piece is a one-off, developed through conversation and then drawn slowly by hand. It’s a working method that stands in deliberate contrast to the speed and replicability that dominate much of the tattoo industry right now.
This has attracted a loyal and international client base, including the Irish singer-songwriter Dermot Kennedy, who commissioned Travis to create a piece about the emotional experience of writing music. It’s the kind of collab that reinforces the point. Travis doesn’t just execute ideas; he interprets them. This distinction matters, and it’s what elevates his work from craft into something closer to directed illustration.
A book you’re meant to draw on
Right now, Travis is channelling that practice into a new format. His debut book, While Some of Me Sleeps, is currently on Kickstarter and scheduled for release in the spring. It collects tattoo drawings made across those 16 countries, alongside stencils and handwritten notes. But the interesting twist is that pages have been deliberately left open for readers to draw on themselves.
In short, it’s an art book that functions as an invitation. You’re not just consuming the work; you’re extending it. For a book born out of tattooing, a medium that requires another person’s body to exist, this approach makes intuitive sense.
Pushing the idea even further, Travis hosted a preview event in Brooklyn at the end of January, where enlarged pages from the book were installed on the walls for guests to draw on; essentially turning the collaborative ethos of the book into a live installation.
Why this matters
Travis’s practice is worth studying not because tattooing is fashionable, but because his working model quietly solves a problem that most creatives constantly wrestle with. How do you build trust with a client quickly enough that they give you real creative freedom? How do you develop a visual language distinctive enough that people seek you out for it, rather than asking you to mimic something else?
In the case of Travis the answer, apparently, is to be extremely good at listening, to work slowly and by hand, and to come from a discipline (engineering) that nobody would expect to produce surrealist dream imagery. And for anyone who’s ever sat through a briefing meeting, wishing the client would just say what they feel and leave the room, there might be a lesson in all of that.
