SKIN DEEP MAGAZINE • 41W
hich is to say, he’s gone from being a
‘strong contender’ to being ‘the picture on
the wall’... the one being chased. I’ve seen
how hard he has worked and he more than
deserves his seat at the table with his heroes—who are
now his friends. It’s a journey that bears closer inspection.
Siebert came up the same way as most of us born around
the same time, through comics and WWE (then WWF)
wrestling. That was as good as pop-culture got back then
and it’s odd to hear somebody talk about how tattooing
eclipsed even those two giants. I push him about whether
those influences are still with him...
“I was a big comic fan when I was a teenager. When I
started tattooing I really gave up most of my other pas-
times. I stopped everything to focus on tattooing. When I
first started to notice tattooing, I was 6 or 7.
“I was into WWF and in particular the Undertaker. To
me he was like a comic figure in reality and he was tat-
tooed and that really caught my attention. So I started
tattooing my action figures and it all started from there.
“I became super fascinated about how you could cre-
ate art on skin—like creating comics on skin. A bit later I
got into rock music and everyone was tattooed and it re-
ignited my interest again.
“I started trying to find out who the artists were that
were tattooing the bands I loved like Slipknot and found
out it was Paul Booth. As I later found out he was also the
tattoo artist for the Undertaker so it was like a circle get-
ting completed.
“I started coming across him more and more and read
his biography. He was one of the big influences when I was
starting out. He was part of the movement in the late 90s
that I felt really pushed the tattoo industry in a new di-
rection. The guys who were tattoo legends that I took my
inspiration from were, Paul, Guy Aitchison and Filip Leu.
“These were the 3 that reinvented tattooing and I got su-
per inspired by them and their style. They showed me the
full potential of tattooing through their individual styles.
“I loved the way Guy and Filip used body shape and un-
derstood the importance of anatomy along with colour
concepts and how tattoos worked with the flow of the body.
“When I got into tattooing 14 years ago I gave up all myIt’s been a long time since I’ve seen Julian Siebert—four or five years
maybe—and even though I’ve heard his name mentioned here and there,
I never really stopped to look closely at his work simply because I knew
his work was solid. That said, I was ill-prepared for exactly how sharply he
has honed his skills in that relatively short space of time. Seeing his output
from the last couple of years has been a real punch in the mouth...corpsepainter.com • julian.siebertWORDS: SION SMITHKING
OF THE
MOUNTAIN