Pentax 35mm Camera Tattoo

While digging through hundreds of RSS feeds that jam pack my reader each week, I ran across an impressive camera tattoo on the arm of Lotte van den Acker of an Asahi Pentax 35mm SLR. Normally I would see a camera tattoo and think big whoop but this was one different and I thought it should be shared. I reached out to Lotte and asked a few questions about the camera tattoo and found out a little more about the meaning.

What brought on this idea? Any influences or just something you wanted to tattoo onto your body? 

Before I got this tattoo I have had others but I wasn’t allowed from my mom to put any ink on my underarm because of my career future. For a while it had been sure that photography is my great passion and future, and as a photographer a tattoo on my underarm wouldn’t be a limitation. I started thinking about a tattoo that would represent my passion. A camera is not a very elegant object and I thought ‘just a camera’ would be kind of boring, so I thought of something to make it more original. While brainstorming about it, I came up with the optical illusion idea.

Is that camera model have any particular meaning to you?

A friend of my mom’s owned this camera and after I was born she took beautiful photos of me as a baby with my mom with this camera. Later, my mom bought that same camera from her friend and by the time I was 10 I started using it as well. So it has multiple meanings to me.

Will you be adding any other photo related tattoos anytime soon?

Not sure. I have lots of ideas for new tattoos that don’t have anything to do with photography. But I am finishing my arm (sleeve) and maybe to fill it up I’ll put a film roll.

Whats the first thing people say when they see the camera tattoo?

Most people react really enthusiastic about this tattoo, especially other photographers. But I don’t walk with my arm in front of my face the entire day to show it off.

Lotte van den Acker is a photography student from The Netherlands at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam studying digital photography. Photography by: Dylan Ray Fenix and Niké Dolman