Interview with Egi Selja

I was born in Albania and moved to Belgium when I was 16. I studied graphic design, then interior architecture, but quit both. Interior architecture was far more technical than I expected: how walls are built, what’s inside them, how much materials weigh. It wasn’t what I was looking for creatively, so I took a break and went to Australia.

In Australia, I asked myself what I actually wanted to do, and the answer was simply to connect to my creative self. I started drawing and people started responding to my drawings, and one thing led to another. When I moved to Toronto in 2021, I thought, I’m in a big city, I can actually try this. I was bartending at the time, and eventually a studio opened its doors to me, and I’ve now been tattooing for about five years (officially)

Before I went to Australia, I reached out to Toni from GoldenHands, the tattoo artist in Albania who had been tattooing me, to ask for guidance. I took a course on skin and hygiene while shadowing him for a couple of months. The rest I figured out on my own, with friends generous enough to trust me with their skin. I’m still learning from every artist I cross paths with.

What I really love about tattooing is that it’s interactive. With my drawings or paintings, I’m working with my own story. I’m discovering something about myself. With tattooing, I’m meeting another person and trying to understand their story. What are they working through? What are they trying to express? What are they trying to leave behind? Then I interpret that through my own vision.

It’s more like creating a space where somebody can express their ideas and feelings. Sometimes there’s something almost therapeutic about that process. It’s still my interpretation of their story, but the session isn’t about me. They’re allowing me to enter that space with them.

Because I think tattooing can be more than just choosing a symbol. Say somebody tells me, “My dog passed away and I want to tattoo their paw print.” I would probably ask, okay, what do you actually miss about your dog? What did you do together? How did you feel when you were with them?

Let’s go deeper than the surface symbolism. Because what you’re really saying is that you miss your dog, you love your dog, and maybe you miss the person you were when you were together. So instead of simply copying a paw print, can we create something that exists specifically between you and your dog?

I don’t think every tattoo has to be meaningful, but I would like it to be intentional. That’s an important difference for me.

People normally reach out because they’ve seen my previous work. When we meet, I’ll set up, we’ll grab a coffee and talk. There’s usually some kind of story behind why they’ve come to me. You can start getting a sense of the person, whether they’re more fluid or structured, whether they’re attracted to something darker, something softer, something more organic.

Then I draw directly on them. We’ll usually spend an hour or two working with different pencils and markers, building the design together on their body. The body is a huge part of the tattoo for me. If I’m working on an arm, I’ll ask the person to move it around. I want the tattoo to complement the body and wrap around it organically. It shouldn’t only look good when somebody is standing perfectly still.

Once we settle on something, I like them to take a break for about 20 minutes and sit with it. I want them to make sure it actually feels right before we tattoo it. Then we start. I don’t like rushing that process.

I don’t really know anymore. I used to call it contemporary, conceptual and freehand. It’s still illustrative. It’s flowy and organic. It needs to work with the body.

I think of my flash as my story, something that came from me that happens to resonate with another person. My custom freehand work is more like their story, interpreted through the way I see them. One starts with me and finds somebody else. The other starts with somebody else and comes through me.

Intuition is very important, especially with the freehand work. I don’t really know exactly what the tattoo will look like until the day of the appointment. I have to meet you. There’s unpredictability in that. It excites me. You walk into the room not completely knowing what you’re going to come out with.

Some of my favourite situations are when somebody comes to me and basically says, “I have this much money, and you have my leg. Do whatever you want.” That’s rare, but I love it.

I’ve also worked in walk-in studios, and a lot of people who originally came to me for small walk-in tattoos later became clients for my personal work. During that experience, I can introduce them to the way I actually think about tattooing. If it resonates with them, they might come back. And that does happen.

I think there are commercial artists and non-commercial artists, and there’s nothing wrong with either. Some tattoo artists genuinely want to work commercially. They see tattooing as a medium that allows them to make good money, repeat successful flash and build a stable career. That’s completely valid. It’s just not what I want for myself.

But it’s really difficult to survive purely as an artist. Commercial tattooing can give a beginner much more financial stability, and finding the balance between supporting yourself financially and protecting the way you want to make art is really difficult.

Another challenge for me is helping people understand tattooing the way I understand it. A lot of people want a Pinterest tattoo. That’s completely okay, but it’s not necessarily the work I want to make.

I also have a weird relationship with money. I struggle to price my tattoos, and I find talking about money very uncomfortable. I’m still figuring out what the next step is for financially supporting myself while protecting my artistic practice.

The struggle of trying to survive as an artist is probably one of the biggest things everybody knows about but doesn’t talk about enough. And I don’t think that’s unique to tattooing. Fine artists have always gone through it too.

Unfortunately, it’s basically become the place where clients find you. I struggle with it. Marketing yourself is an entire job on its own. You need to make posts, think about how to present yourself, figure out how to sell your flash, answer messages, answer emails. Sometimes one client involves 20 or 30 emails back and forth.

Then you need to keep posting because if you’re inactive, you feel like the platform punishes you. People don’t always talk about how much work tattoo artists do outside of actually tattooing.

I don’t think originality disappears because of social media, but there can be pressure. You might post one tattoo, it gets a lot of attention, and suddenly everybody asks you to make that same thing. Maybe it isn’t even what you want to be known for.

People will say, “Oh my God, you’re so cool.” And I’m like, okay. Why? They imagine you can become a tattoo artist, travel around the world and work wherever you want. In reality, it’s very difficult.

Europe inspires me a lot. Every time I go to Brussels, Lisbon, Italy, I see so many incredible artists. Sometimes I’m almost terrified by the idea of moving back because the level of artistry is so high.

I also feel that art can sometimes be more accessible there. I was in Porto last year and there was a tattoo event happening in a park. You see pop-ups and creative events in different spaces. Europe sometimes feels a little looser in that sense, which creates interesting spaces for art to happen.

But actually travelling there to work is another thing. Imagine going to a country where you don’t know anybody and trying to convince people that your approach to tattooing is what they need during the ten days you’re in their city.

If I go to Brussels, I can usually find work. If I go to Albania, I probably won’t. The way people understand tattooing there is different. In Albania, it’s still more dependent on word of mouth and there’s more of an expectation that a tattoo artist should be able to do every style.

Then you have flights, accommodation, supplies. Sometimes you’re lucky if you even come out ahead financially. The benefit is that you get to see another country, meet artists and work in another studio. That’s valuable. But it’s not this glamorous way of making lots of money that people imagine.

A lot of it comes from self-reflection. My own drawings are about understanding myself and understanding human nature. Then I carry that into tattooing and try to understand what my clients are going through. I’m very interested in the struggles people share and the ways we’re all trying to connect with each other.

I really like psychology. I’m interested in Esther Perel and her work around relationships. My partner studies philosophy, so we have a lot of conversations about philosophy, psychology and human behaviour. That definitely feeds into the way I think.

Yes. They can change something, but they can also emphasize something that was already there. If a tattoo helps you accept a part of yourself, then it’s changing the way you perceive yourself.

I had a client who had struggled with her body for years. She came to me and basically said, “This is my body, and I want to accept it.” We created a tattoo that followed and emphasized her curves. For her, it was a way of saying, I accept myself, and I want something on my body that reminds me of that acceptance.

I feel that with my own tattoos too. I’ll be in a particular stage of my life and suddenly feel drawn toward a certain design. Then I start asking myself why. What is this design telling me about where I am right now? What am I trying to leave behind? What am I trying to emphasize?

With my drawings, I’ll sometimes begin with something almost like a scribble. Then I start building on it, and something eventually comes out of whatever I’m thinking or feeling in that moment. I don’t erase. Whatever mark I’ve made is there, and I have to work with it. Tattooing has that same quality. Once you’ve done something, it’s there.

Some of my favourite drawings came from the exact moment when I thought I’d fucked them up. I would look at it and think, there’s no way back now. Then because there was no way back, I had to work with what was already there. I kept going, and sometimes it became my favourite part of the drawing.

During a long tattoo session, my mind goes somewhere else. Everything becomes very focussed and quiet. People call it a flow state, but for me it doesn’t necessarily feel like movement. It’s more like being suspended somewhere. Almost like clouds. Everything is quiet, and I’m just there.

There are a lot of different styles in the studio and a real mix of people. French, Italian, Canadian, Ukrainian, Russian. I feel supported there, and I like my coworkers. We recently moved to a more industrial area. There are coffee places around, there’s a brewery. Coffee and beer. That’s all you need.

I think it’s the interaction. I can make drawings about myself whenever I want. Tattooing gives me another person, another story, another body and another moment that I couldn’t have created by myself.

And because I don’t know exactly what we’re going to make until we’re there together, it stays exciting. It’s unpredictable. That’s what I like about it.