With Halloween just around the corner and being a pretty big horror film fan, I decided to go looking for a tattoo artist who could offer something impressive in the way of horror tattoos. Well, it didn’t take long. In case you’re wondering, all it takes is googling the words “Horror tattoos” and the name of arguably the best horror tattooist in the business is right at the top.
Dan Henk almost didn’t end up right at the top of any sort of tattoo related Google search. After finishing high school, he was offered an apprenticeship by a tattoo artist friend of his brother’s. Dan turned the offer down because at the time his personal view of tattoos was that they really were quite a limited art form. It wasn’t until he was exposed to a variety of tattoo styles and particularly the work of people like Guy Aitchison, Aaron Caine and Tom Renshaw that Dan gave the idea of being a tattoo artist a little more thought.
Dan’s artistic background brought him into all different spheres of design and creativity. His love for punk rock provided him with the opportunity to create album covers and band art and even a sweet little gig doing the cover art for the punk rock bible known as Maximum Rock n Roll. He writes short stories, he paints (and has shown his work at numerous galleries), he draws and all of these things whether indirectly or directly obvious, make up his work. Of course, there’s also the horror movies and the gloriously disturbing images that they so regularly offer up.
‘The thing I like about punk rock is freedom, freedom in its extreme. I want to go to the depths of stuff. The same as I do with horror images.’
Dan’s tattoos are scary and often extreme, but they’re always heavy on quality. He’s the spookiest.
