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Alex Reinke
Backgrounds
Interview by Crash
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Crash: Alex Reinke. Holy Fox Tattoo.
Alex: Exactly.
Yeah? Where is your location at?
In Plettenberg. In the middle of Germany. (laughs)
In the middle of nowhere in Germany. But that's gonna change soon. I go to work in Athens from September till January and then move to and work in Kopenhagen with my wife Sarah.
Okay. Um, how many years have you been tattooing?
I'm going into my 12th year now.
12th year?
Yeah.
You know, last year we were supposed to do this interview.
It's true.
Remember? We sat in Switzerland in the restaurant and started talking and I was like "No, no. We have to stop 'cause we don’t want to say it again."
It's true, it's true. Exactly.
Tell me how you came to become a tattooer. 'Cause this is what you started telling me and I made you stop.
Well, that’s a quite...a little bit long story...but basically...
We have 35 hours. [On the recorder.]
Fantastic. (laughs)
But, um, well first, for my...for the record, I started drawing
and painting first when I was a kid of course, like most people
reading this I guess. Then I started to do Martial Arts with 12
and developed a very big interest in Japan. And then I started
to draw Japanese images, like dragons and stuff through the
Martial Arts. And I got hold on to some books, which some
designs were inside with samurai and stuff like this. And I was
starting to draw this stuff; from woodblock prints as well. So I
started to draw from this stuff. Very weak, you know, of course,
but it was very nice for me. I liked it. Landscapes as well. And,
um, then of course the movies.
You know, Yakuza movies and all this stuff. And then I saw the
tattoos, you know? And then I bought a book about... when I was
14 I bought a book about Japanese tattoos, the Fellman book. It
was my first tattoo book and there was Horiyoshi’s work in it and
I drew stuff out of there. Crazy enough. I mean, I don’t know. It’s
just very much coincidence and uh....
Or it's destiny.
Yeah, in a way. In a way when I look back on the whole thing, it’s
really crazy. When I look back... it’s everything that happened in
a way... My average school time, I wasn’t that super good but I
wasn’t that bad either. But it was not like...it didn’t really seem
like I’m going to be a nice academic career guy who like... my
parents would like me to be...maybe something, you know?
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