The New Zealander, 36, who works in Clerkenwell, London, talks to Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe
I can’t wake up to an alarm — I don’t like it. I tell myself what time to wake up before I go to sleep. I don’t know how it works, but it always seems to. Around 8 I go for a pee, have a shower, get dressed, put my make-up on and feed the cats, Lola and Bell. I acquired them from my ex-boyfriend; I love them. I’ve grown rocket and tomatoes this year, so I make a salad for lunch and chuck a banana in to eat at work. I ride my bike to the studio, Into You, in Clerkenwell. I try to be there by 10, giving me two hours to draw.
I didn’t mean to go into tattooing — it was a total mistake. I thought I was going to be a musician: I love singing. I grew up on a beautiful farm just north of Auckland. My parents still live there — they owned takeaways on the beach. When I’d just turned 16 my art teacher gave me a really, really bad mark and my mum told her she was a f***ing cow and made me leave school. I was broke and had no qualifications, so I walked into a tattoo studio in Auckland to sell designs I’d doodled, and the guy who owned the shop fell in love with me, pretty much. I started working there and that was that.
Tattoos are like the diary of your life: every one has a memory of what was going on at the time. When you first get tattooed you see “tattoo” when you look at yourself naked. Then as you get more and you just see empty skin — everything else is coloured in and you have this one white patch. I think part of the addiction is getting rid of skin.
I’m a keen art collector: my left leg is my collecting leg — all small pieces that remind me of different friends — whereas my right leg is one piece and my arms are another. My sister, Kimshiree, moved to New Zealand and I miss her terribly. I’m tossing up whether to get her name on my wedding finger — the only part of my hand I’m not tattooed on because I’m such an old romantic.
I can have a lunch break if I like, but I tend to graze during the day. What people want goes through stages — I guess that’s fashion. At the moment I’m doing a lot of koi fish, but I’ve done some strange things in my time. I tattooed an angry duck on a dwarf’s penis. It was a cartoon duck going “Grrr”. And that was his only tattoo — he’d been dared to do it by his office. After I’d done it he said: “Can you write ‘the angry duck’ underneath?” He came back a year later and got big cartoon oval eyes on his arse.
You can’t think about how you’re hurting clients when you’re drawing a line: if you do you’re not going to put it in properly. I try to help people relax. It can be quite comfortable when you learn to relax. But it depends: if you’re female and you’ve got your period it’s more sensitive, or if you’re feeling a little bit unstable mentally.
Pretty much all my customers are amazing — they let me do what I like on them, with just a small brief. Some of them really push me and I like that: they want something extra special, with lots of detail, and it feels like I’m going up a gear. There’ll be a stage where I’ll think: “Wow, how did I actually do that?”
I was never going to be heavily tattooed. I don’t know what happened. But when I’m old it will grow with me and I’ll still look beautiful. I put sunscreen on to stop them fading. I’ve still got my back and my front to go — but I don’t know if I want my titties done — and a bit of thigh and maybe something on my face, but not until I’m older, and then I’ll be out of space and over being tattooed. You have days when you’ll be walking down the street and nobody will look at you and then you’ll have a day where every person stops you or stares. I think I scare some guys. They don’t really approach me any more. I haven’t been asked out on a date in three years.
Usually me and the girls have a cocktail around six o’clock in the studio, and I try to finish at seven. I’ve got lots of friends who are DJs and musicians. We love eating out and going to gigs and bars. If I’m not out I’ll cook dinner for me and my two flatmates and do a rough sketch for the morrow, or check my e-mails and maybe reply — I’m rubbish at that. I’ve got a massive library of art books, so I’ll flip through what to take to work the next day.
I go to bed at about midnight and put some ambient music on, really chilled and slow. Bell jumps up. I try to get her off me — she f***in’ squashes me, but she loves to sleep on my chest. I have to look at the clock next to my bed. If I don’t know what the time is before I go to sleep, I have trouble knowing what time to wake up. I say, “Go to sleep, ” and that’s it.
Nikole appears in London Ink, the Discovery Real Time series, on Sundays at 10pm
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