Hi, I’m Jon Poulson

Hi, I’m Jon Poulson. I’ve been tattooing for 23 years. I’ve had the opportunity to tattoo all over the world, but for the past 16 years I’ve called Salt Lake City, Utah, USA home.
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I had the pleasure of apprenticing under the great Michael Fatutoa, who did his best to teach this ancient craft to someone naive enough to believe he could actually be any good at it (me).
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Back in the early 2000s, an apprenticeship was a lesson in and of itself. I learned pretty quickly that tattooing was about a lot more than putting a design on someone’s skin. I learned to respect the history of this craft, its traditions, and the generations of people who carried it forward long before any of us were here.
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Tattooing is one of humanity’s oldest art forms. Across cultures and throughout history, people have marked their bodies to show where they came from, what they believed in, what they had endured, what they hoped for, and who they belonged to.
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Modern tattooing may look different, but I don’t think the reasons we tattoo ourselves have changed all that much.
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We still use tattoos to remember. To celebrate. To mourn. To worship. To protect. To mark victories and struggles. To connect ourselves to our families, our cultures, our beliefs, or simply to the person we have fought to become.
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Everyone is more than meets the eye. Tattoos give us a way to put some of that story on the outside.
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These days, my work focuses mainly on Nordic-inspired tattooing. We still don’t know with certainty whether the people of ancient Scandinavia tattooed themselves. But we do know they decorated the world around them. Their ships, weapons, jewelry, clothing, homes, stones, and everyday objects were covered with imagery that clearly meant something to them.
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I’d like to believe some of those designs found their way onto skin as well.
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Looking back at the artwork they left behind, reading the old stories, studying the symbolism, and figuring out how to reinterpret those ideas on the human body in a way that is visually powerful while still respecting where they came from. That is what inspires the work I create today.