Il Tela

Andrea, who tattoos as Tela, is a resident artist at The White Whale Tattoo Society. His work sits in Blackwork and Graphic, and it carries the mark of a long practice in illustration.

He spent around a decade as an illustrator before tattooing, and that history is visible in every piece. The drawing comes first. His tattoos are built on clean black outlines, confident and unbroken, then filled with dense hatching that gives weight and shadow without a drop of color. It is a way of working that belongs to the printed page as much as to the skin.

His subjects are drawn from nature: plants, animals, flowers, the natural world rendered with an illustrator's attention to structure. But the work does not stay strictly naturalistic. There is a surreal turn in it, a small wrongness or unexpected combination that pulls the image away from straightforward botanical study and into something stranger.

Hatching is where his hand is most recognizable. The density, the direction, the way lines build into tone: this is slow, deliberate work, and it rewards close looking. A piece by Andrea holds detail that a quick glance will miss.