You might think the “Bam Bam” in the title is a reference to your eyeballs exploding in succession at the bright complex colour fields in these amazing tattoos, but it’s the middle name of Polish tattoo artist Lukasz Bam Kaczmarek working out of Kult Tattoo Fest, who you can find online at facebook.com/getbambam. I’m in awe not just as his image design, which to my eye screams of the very best in South American street art, but especially at the way he uses colour, blending the hues together as if they were wet bleeding paint, applying nuances of saturation and tone as if with an airbrush or a spray can, not a tattoo needle.

I am in continual amazement at the ever-increasing standards that the tattoo community holds itself to. If a “fine” artist were to produce a piece like this in a week of work after a month of preparation, they’d be happy with themselves. But tattoo artists are expected to do it day-in-and-day-out, on demand, at a lightning pace that never lets up. There are few fields that demand as much creative effort from its workers as tattooing — and there are few workers as capable of producing it as the modern tattoo artist.

I’ve been flipping through a lot of amazing German tattoo artists who are doing beautiful hybrid art tattooing like in the entry before this one after readers started sending me lots of wonderful links to galleries. The first to catch my eye was the ultra-talented Mark Halbstark (on Facebook at fb/halbstark.onroad). Most of his work is actually in color, so what I’m going to share here isn’t really that representative, but I liked this negative space heart running across two feet, and I quickly whipped together a collage of a collection of the palm tattoos he’s installed (you can zoom that picture for a slightly closer look), which judging by the healed shots in his portfolio, he’s very good at making stay, which is not an easy feat. Be sure to search for more of his work, because this is just the tip of the iceberg and his style is much broader.

When I first saw some of Sven’s tattoos posted on Facebook with the title “Scratcher’s Paradise” I asked myself what kind of ignorant art-unaware fool would think this was bad tattooing? It took me a minute before I realized that’s actually the humorous name of this German tattoo studio which you can find online at scratchers-paradise.de. All of the photos in this entry are by Sven, but the other artist at the shop, Marco, is also very talented. But I like Sven’s work because it’s a brilliant fusion of modern fine art and “trash” tattooing and urban street art, but at the same time seamlessly fusing it with traditional tattoo influences in a way that is very rare in modern tattooing. Sven’s work really stands out from the increasingly large crowd of tattoo artists exploring new flavors of the tattoo artform. His shop is based in Berlin, but Sven tours and guests regularly — for example he’s at Xoil’s Needles Slide in France in October — so you can get in touch with him at [email protected] to make an appointment.

Click to zoom in to see the pictures larger, and visit them on Facebook or on the web for more.

PS. It was mentioned to me that there are a number of German artist are working in this general style — I was thinking that one of the reasons that we see such art-conscious work coming out of Germany, France, and Belgium for example is that these are cultures that are deeply aware of fine art history and traditional fine art skills, but are also very forward facing cultures. If I was an anthropologist or sociologist or art historian or something I think it would be a fascinating thing to write a book exploring how national cultures express themselves in the body art world. Anyway, if you like what you see in this entry, you should also check out the work of Peter Aurisch.