Time Out at 40

Mariska Majoor | Henk Schiffmacher | Rineke Dijkstra

Henk Schiffmacher

Henk ‘Hanky Panky’ Schiffmacher
He’s tattooed the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kurt Cobain, the Wu-Tang Clan and Cypress Hill, among others. Amsterdam’s Henk Schiffmacher is commissioned by world-class artists, quite simply because he’s the best. He calls himself the 'poor man’s Rembrandt'. But it doesn’t stop there. He’s also a writer, TV producer, international lecturer, founder of a museum on the history of tattooing and an ambassador for an HIV-related African foundation. He’s one of our heroes because of his incomparable body of work.

You have been chosen as a Time Out Amsterdam local hero. How do you feel about that?
You are a legend or a little hero within your own population, among your own people, within your own subculture or culture and sure, hell! I always felt like an ambassador for this trade, for the tribe of the tattooed people, so, yeah! It makes me happy.

How does being in Amsterdam impact on your work?
This city with its big harbour and its seventeenth-century history – all our great painters and all the museums, Van Gogh, Rembrandt – it’s really an open-air museum. Of course it’s a big inspiration. It’s in your genes this stuff, in your genes. But as a tattoo man, I always look to the what and the how and the where of what I’m tattooing, so this makes me much more of a world citizen than a local. I feel much more a part of an international community of tattoo people, which includes not only the hip, the young, the beautiful, the trendy and the film stars, but people with the most fantastic tattoos in the world out there in Sudan, in Darfur, where there’s a lot of trouble. I feel a great connection with this marked human being, the tattooed person. This makes the world larger for me, but also smaller. Tattooing is a very strange thing.
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Has Amsterdam had an impact on the kind of tattoos you do?
People come to a city like this to get street cred and to get tattooed. Most of my fame in the tattoo world came from tattooing a bunch of rock ’n’ roll people, very famous people, and if I had been in Pittsburgh or Idaho I wouldn’t have met these people. This city is a harbour, a maritime place. It is the beginning or the end of one’s travels, so that, by tradition, is where the tattoo man is.

And who are your Amsterdam Heroes?
The old seafarers from the Dutch East India Company who were looking for a way to India, these are the Dutch heroes. You have rock ’n’ roll heroes, Golden Earring, Herman Brood. There are heroes at every level. In the old days definitely artists Frans Hals (although he’s a Haarlem guy) and Rembrandt.

What’s your favourite place or thing in Amsterdam?
One is the Nieuwe Kerk, which contains the coffin and the memorial of our great seafaring hero Lieutenant-Admiral Michiel De Ruyter, our Nelson. You can see his big oak coffin with banners on it, his white-marble mausoleum, his full armour. It’s a very patriotic thing. I’m not as patriotic as it sounds, but he’s always been one of my heroes. And Rembrandt’s paintings, because you can see the whole city, how it was in its heyday. The seventeenth century at a certain point was totally out of hand. In Bartholomeus van der Helst’s Celebration of the Peace of Munster they were dressed up and it couldn’t get any more gay. They were all in pink and wearing feathers. They had an enormously eccentric lifestyle. This is one of the most incredible paintings coming out of that era. The Rijksmuseum is really what it’s all about. The Rijksmuseum is our Fort Knox.

What’s your personal favourite moment in Amsterdam? Where were you and what happened?
I’m pretty sure the craziest things are still yet to come instead of having already happened.

Amsterdam is…
…the Tatican, which is like the Vatican but for tattooing.
Interview by Lauren Comiteau

Mariska Majoor | Henk Schiffmacher | Rineke Dijkstra