Hype&Hyper

In today’s article, we have gathered five Budapest-based tattoo artists with very different styles that are worth keeping an eye out for.

Do you consider getting a tattoo from time to time, but haven’t found the right artist just yet? Or maybe you’re already planning your umpteenth tattoo? Whichever it is, you might want to check out the following artists who have shared a bit about themselves and their work.

Anna Csörgő

According to Czech novelist Milan Kundera, what is more, important and profound than talent is the basic approval we have for the essence of our profession. “This is how I feel when it comes to tattooing. I’ve liked it since I was a child, and I endorse the idea of having little figures and inscriptions on people’s skin. I like to go to the beach to see who has chosen what for self-expression, or browse YouTube to see what techniques other people are working with (...),” explains Anna.

These days, Anna mostly works with realistic designs, but she also enjoys creating simpler, more naive pieces. In 2020, she and her friends founded their underground collective, named Patika. This group also includes Eliza Göncz and Bence Süsködi, who will be introduced later.

“I love the drawing part, having good conversations with my guests, overcoming technical difficulties, and exploring new possibilities—I’ve really enjoyed the last couple of years and I hope to continue this way for a long time to come,” she adds.

Eliza Göncz

“The tattoos I’ve been doing lately have a bucolic, slightly romantic vibe. It basically comes from a feeling of longing. A yearning to leave the city without actually leaving it, in a contemporary way, through tattoos,” says Eliza. She chooses to include elements of folk art and references to folk tales in her designs to dispel the negative emotions that have overshadowed the sense of Hungarian identity in recent years.

Bence Sükösdi

“I like to draw fast, dirty, with lots of gestures. With my tattoos, I try to reproduce this momentum and the resulting textures on skin. In terms of imagery, my main inspiration is classical art, American traditional patterns and symbols, often completely random things I come across. But otherwise, I don’t necessarily know what I’m doing,” concludes Bence wittily.

Levente Németh

Ever since childhood, he has been attracted to surrealistic and morbid imagery, which is the primary inspiration for his work. “My career started in my mother’s kitchen in subhuman conditions: cigarette smoke, using toilet paper as wipes, cheap paint stored beside leftover food, a drunk rocker classmate, and a 16-year-old boy with a piece of useless machinery in his hand, with no idea of what the trade entails. I got my first tattoo that year and I knew immediately that this was the world I felt at home in,” Levi shared.

“The smell of the needles, the tools, the chemicals, and the sense of endless possibilities is what makes me feel happy doing what I do, even after nine years.”

Bence Márton

Bence Márton is a graphic design student at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, who was introduced to the medium of tattooing seven years ago. “My goal is to create tattoos that exist as true art pieces, to convey a message to the recipient that expresses the human essence.”

Bence plans to create a tattoo exhibition for his diploma project, during which he would like to do at least seven full-back tattoos. He is confident that in a few years, all art academies and universities will have a tattoo course and that the body will also appear as an artistic medium, as tattooing is also an immensely complex field.