Alex Binnie is the founder of Into You Tattoo. His wood-cut drawings of friends from the tattoo community  (which caught our attention at the Tattoo Convention last year), will be published in book which is out soon from Kintaro Publishing.

I’m from England – born in Oxford. We lived in India when I was a kid for a bit. I sometimes think my tattoo/piercing persuasion might have come from there. We lived in Rajasthan and I’m sure I was dumped on an Indian station platform, sat there, gazing at crowds of Indian ladies with saris and nose piercings and other adornments.

I’ve just always liked tattoos. I started getting tattooed in the late 70s – the punk era. My first tattoo was a rose on my forearm from a guy who had a little shop on the Kings Road in the Great Gear Market. I was well proud. My parents weren’t even that shocked.

I was also a medical illustrator. Any big institution had an A/V or photography department. And big hospitals had illustrators. Most of the graphics were scalpels and diagrams. I did some drawings from life, or actually, of death. I drew some surgery and got to go into the mortuary and draw anatomy. Then I went part-time and started tattooing. The first tattoo I did was filling in this fish. Then I practised on myself.

I’ve got a 14 year old daughter – she hasn’t got any tattoos yet. She’s pierced her ear three times and she’s getting a nose piercing in the summer holidays if she does well at school. She’s threatened to get tattoos. I can’t stop her but I’ve said I’d prefer if she didn’t.

I didn’t really do an apprenticeship. Forget it! Those things didn’t exist then. I started from a squat in Guildford Street in the late 80s. My friend Loren ran an art gallery from there; some of the artists have done quite well, and others are dead.

There was no underground tattoo scene back then. There was no tattoo scene. It was all mainstream, old-school guys – those fat old guys like Jock (Liddel) in King’s Cross and Lal Hardy; they did flash – you know – swallows and that. There was no undercurrent of people doing more contemporary stuff. If you were young, alternative -ish, music-scene kind of person and you wanted to get tattooed, basically you had to go to an old school guy who wouldn’t get it at all.