INK & IRONBook

Hackney Road, E2

Meet the artists.

Three residents, three disciplines — and one owner holding the whole thing together. Pick your person, or let the matcher do it for you.

Portrait of Maya, Fine Line / Botanical artist at INK & IRON

The Minimalist

Maya

01

Fine Line / Botanical

“A line should be as honest as the person wearing it.”

Maya spent three years in Copenhagen drawing botanicals before coming back to east London. She works almost exclusively in single needle — ferns pressed between book pages, fine script, small florals that heal like pencil lines. The gentlest chair in the shop, and the one she'd point a first-timer at.

In the chair
8 years
Works
Tue–Sat
Min session
1 hour
Won't do
Traditional

Known for: Single-needle botanicals

Book with Maya See Maya's work →
Portrait of Josh, Traditional / Neo Traditional artist at INK & IRON

The Traditionalist

Josh

02

Traditional / Neo Traditional

“Bold will hold. Everything else is marketing.”

Josh apprenticed in a Portsmouth street shop at nineteen and has been packing solid colour for fifteen years since. Roses, panthers, daggers, ships — the classics, done properly and built to age with you. Ask him for fine line and he'll walk you down the hall to Maya; he simply won't do it.

In the chair
15 years
Works
Mon–Sat
Min session
1 hour
Won't do
Fine line

Known for: Classic flash & colour packing

Book with Josh See Josh's work →
Portrait of Alex, Blackwork / Geometric artist at INK & IRON

The Geometrist

Alex

03

Blackwork / Geometric

“Precision isn't a style. It's a habit.”

Alex came to tattooing from architecture school, and it shows: sacred geometry, dotwork mandalas, heavy black sleeves composed like blueprints. Sittings run long by design — a three-hour minimum — so large-scale work gets finished properly instead of in fragments.

In the chair
6 years
Works
Tue–Sat
Min session
3 hours
Won't do
Colour

Known for: Geometry & heavy black

Book with Alex See Alex's work →
Portrait of Dani, owner of INK & IRON, at the front desk

The Owner

Dani

04

Owner & front desk

“I opened the shop to tattoo, not to answer forty DMs a night.”

Dani opened INK & IRON in 2016 with two chairs and a secondhand kettle. Ten years on she still tattoos two days a week — black and grey, mostly — and runs everything else from the front desk: the diary, the deposits, the waitlists, the 11pm reminder texts. She is the reason the shop feels like a local instead of a franchise, and until recently she was also its bottleneck. InkSync took the desk work off her plate; she kept the kettle.

Founded the shop
2016
Tattoos
2 days a week
Runs
Diary · deposits · waitlists
Admin before InkSync
~9 hrs / week
See what InkSync does for Dani