Profile‘I practised on oranges’: how Hong Kong tattoo artist and studio founder Rob Kelly inked his own path
- Blackout Tattoo founder Rob Kelly, 42, came to Hong Kong in 1994, when it was the ‘Wild West for teenagers’, and got his first tattoo aged 14
- He started apprenticing as a tattoo artist in 2005 before opening his own studio five years later
My father was working in the Royal Engineers, in the British Army, when I was born, in Chatham, Kent, [in southeast England,] in 1979. When I was three, he left the army and worked as an engineer.
He was working on motorways and we’d move to the nearest town, first to Redditch [in central England] and, when I was eight, to Kettering, in Northamptonshire. I quite enjoyed moving and being the new kid in school.
I was a sporty kid, pretty adventurous. From a young age, I was always drawing. I used to try to reproduce comic book panels and remember trying to reproduce a banknote and being worried the government would get me for forgery.
In 1994, my dad got a job offer in Hong Kong to work on the new airport bridge. We had a family discussion about it, and I looked through the Lonely Planet guidebook for Hong Kong that he’d bought.
I was big into skateboarding at the time and when I saw all the concrete, I said yes, I thought it would be great for skateboarding.
East meets the Wild West
We arrived in Hong Kong in 1994 and I went to Sha Tin College. Hong Kong kids were pretty accepting of the new kid because it was such a transient place, especially in the 1990s, when there was a lot of movement.