Vanishing - A Tattoo Artists Fantasy Of Disappearing Online

In a world obsessed with visibility and transparency, there’s something oddly seductive about the idea of disappearing, well for me sometimes anyway...​

I’m a tattoo artist. My days are filled with drawing, working on skin, blood, pain & stories, and the dull glow of screens and bright lights—scrolling, posting, replying, watching algorithms nibble at my creative soul. Social media was once a gallery, a place to showcase the art form that I love so much, but somewhere along the line, it morphed into a digital leash.

Some mornings, I fantasize about vanishing—no more @mentions, no more DMs, no more “Can I get this for £50?” under a post I spent an hour crafting. Just gone. Like smoke. Pifffff and gone...

The fantasy isn’t about rejection—it’s about reclaiming. What if I didn’t have to brand myself to prove I exist? What if my work could whisper through the city like legends before social media was even created? To be known by touch and word-of-mouth instead of hashtags? There’s something poetic to me about the idea: a tattoo artist who has a digital trace, but one day chose to leave it all behind and stop posting to focus on his vision & now there is only the marks on the bodies of those who dared to sit in the chair. So if you wanted to stay up to date with his work you'd have to find the customers who were wearing it.

Imagine this: You want a tattoo? and someone tells you about me. Not because I pop up in your feed, but because your friend’s arm bears the solid, swirling evidence of my craft. You ask around. No website. No public portfolio. Just a phone number scribbled on a coffee shop napkin, or a cryptic address that leads to a small studio that's gently lit, humming with low music and stories. You step in not because I’m trending, but because you trust the myth.

I dream of that kind of existence sometimes—where I don’t have to post “SPACE NEXT WEEK!” every week to survive. Where likes and shares don’t dictate whether my bills get paid. Where art is intimate again. Earned & Felt.

There’s a strange irony to being in an industry promoting permanence while being trapped in platforms that thrive on constant updates. I create tattoo's that stay on your body for a lifetime, but the internet wants me to reinvent myself every 24 hours. It’s exhausting.

Of course, I won’t disappear—at least not entirely. Social media is a tool, and I get it. It’s helped me grow, feed myself, build connections, and travel the world. But still, in quiet moments, I drift to that fantasy of digital invisibility. Of living in the analog. Of making something real without needing to prove it to a screen.

Maybe one day I’ll do it. Delete it all. Let the algorithm forget me. And those who truly want the ink, the art, the story—they’ll find me.

Not through a feed.

But through a feeling.