Some tattoos sit on the body. Makoto Chi’s work seems to travel through it. Creatures stretch across chests, feathers change direction around shoulders, and long, restless contours pull the eye from one part of a composition into the next. The first impression is movement. Look longer and the drawing starts to reveal how that movement is built.
In the backpiece with two large birds, the wings don’t simply fill an empty rectangle. Their shapes establish opposing directions, giving the image a push and pull. Dark feathers gather into substantial masses, while narrower marks keep the surfaces active. There’s enough detail to reward a close look, but the broad shapes still carry the design from a distance.
The chest work makes that relationship to anatomy even clearer. A long creature follows the upper chest rather than pretending the chest is a flat sheet of paper. Its limbs and trailing forms create smaller changes of direction inside the larger curve. Those decisions matter. They allow the drawing to remain expressive while still making sense on a moving person.
Not every piece depends on black alone. In the selected back and upper-arm work, red interrupts the darker drawing without taking over. It works as a visual accent, giving the eye a place to stop before returning to the linework. The color feels integrated into the image rather than added as a separate effect.
There’s also a useful tension between density and openness. Some sections are packed with marks; others let skin carry the space between forms. That contrast keeps the creatures from collapsing into one dark silhouette. You can follow a gesture first, then return for the smaller structures inside it. The design has more than one speed.
Makoto’s own practice includes tattooing, drawing and painting. That wider drawing practice is relevant here, but these tattoos aren’t simply illustrations transferred onto skin. The head and neck work, for example, depends on a specific silhouette and a specific turn of the body. Change that placement and the whole reading changes with it.
What makes this selection worth spending time with is the way it keeps those priorities together: an expressive drawing, a readable large shape and a body that remains part of the composition. The result can be strange, intricate or confrontational without becoming visually arbitrary. It has direction. That’s the hook in Makoto Chi’s blackwork: the image doesn’t stop at being something you recognize. It gives your eye somewhere to go.
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