A Full Circle Moment: Photographing A Decade of Works for My Tattoo Artist

Sometimes you don’t know where life would take you, until years later.

And that’s exactly how it played out with Jayers, a Hawaii-based tattoo artist from Hong Kong, and I.

I first learnt of her work because T, a college friend of mine, decided to get a full back tattoo from her and T asked me to document the process.

That was the summer of 2018, when I decided to shoot more portrait photography and explore if I could make it my career.

T and I did three shoots together: (1) before getting the tattoo, (2) when he was half way through, (3) when the tattoo was pretty much done - which was when we went for an outdoor session.

I’d never forget that misty summer afternoon, unusual for the season. As I look back, that session marked the beginning of my present style.

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Later, T shared the photos with Jayers and she used the images for her tattoo convention.

That’s how we first connected. But we won’t meet in person until the fall of 2023, when I reached out to her for a tattoo.

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By the time we finally met, we’d both arrived at a different stage of life - she as a mother of a toddler, planning to move to Hawai’i; and I had been freelancing as a photographer for almost 5 years, having developed my own approach and style.

We’d grown in our own ways and somehow, we are inspired by similar elements and the works we create share similar motifs: movement, nature 🌳🌊🌅, dance…

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Fast forward to April 2025, I had the pleasure to photograph 70+ of Jayers’ clients in the past ten years, and one of them was, of course, T, whose tattoo marked a turning point in Jayers’ artistic development.

“We should get some shots together.” So I quickly changed to get into the shot with T after photographing him, in a studio this time.

Here we both were, 7 years later.

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Sometimes, I meet creatives who could have been me and I could have been them in a different lifetime. And that’s how it felt in the process of working with Jayers on this shoot.

It’s the feeling of “I know you. And I see you.”