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Want a limited edition artwork tattooed on your skin? Berlin is the place to go


The city’s tattoo studios are booming while the art world flounders. Under a new initiative, buyers receive exclusive rights to an artist’s new design, and the artist receives 50% of the profit

But with its more recent associations with red-light entertainment and gangland crime, modern tattooing has long been shunned by the galleries that turn lines on canvas into financial assets. Instead of familiar designs such as swallows, butterflies or Samoan tribal patterns, customers can grace their skin with a drawing of the old sound system at the nightclub Berghain by artist Andreas Hachulla, or a faux-naïf neon doodle of a wine-drinking woman by Anna Nezhnaya or a sketch of a female clown by concept art duo Eva & Adele. Pop artist Jim Avignon’s cartoonish humanoid flame has to be placed in such a way as to ensure “that a muscle underneath moves the fire”, while Via Lewandowsky’s planet-blue dot must be scaled to the buyer’s height to represent the size ratio of the sun to the Earth, thus highlighting “the marginality of human existence in the universe”.

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Or read this on The Guardian