30 • SKIN DEEP MAGAZINE
to North Africa after having been condemned for differ-
ent purposes —I didn’t find anything.
On the German side, you chose to pay homage to the
tattooer from Hamburg, Karl Finke (1866-1935).
He’s one of the best known to operate at the time I think. A
recent book allowed me to discover him and recreate some
of the flash on the walls as it was supposedly used to be. I
wanted to evoke tattooing with a tough beer drinker of the
imperial navy (which was still not the Kriegsmarine) in a
smokey atmosphere of the smoke of his potential conquest.
Charles Nungesser, Marthe Richer, etc., why did you
chose to add these specific historical characters?
Marthe Richer, alias Marthe Richard was a strange kind
of woman. She used to work in the brothels, she was also
an aviator, with a cigarette in her mouth. She was kind of aspy, a little too close to a German officer during WWII. She
initiated the closure of the brothels in 1946, as it is related
by french writer A.Boudard in the book: ‘La fermeture’.
So, it was kind of a biased homage to a mythomaniac.
My favourite character though is Charles Nungesser
who was really an adventurer, extremely smart, a boxer,
a race pilot, actor. He was a French pilot, a tough one who,
even with his jaws and legs injured wanted straight to go
back to the fight. He had such a charming smile. He could
have been the best pilot, who at the time was René Fonck
—his opposite, much more austere, if he hadn’t been di-
minished. A daredevil. On top of that he had a skull as an
emblem painted on the sides of his plane, with crossed
shinbones, topped with a coffin and two chandeliers on
right and left. All the composition is inside a black heart.