With 1 in 3 people having a tattoo on average worldwide, it’s not surprising to see so many. However recently there has been an explosion of cross stitch tattoos. Initially, it looks like a perfect storm to create this, however, if that was the case, we would have seen the explosion 3 years ago.
No, this is something different.

The Perfect Storm

I’ve said it above, but tattoos are everywhere now. The old and young don’t get tattoos, leaving about a third of the population. Therefore if you DON’T have a tattoo you’re the exception. And with this, we’ve seen a lot of…questionable tattoos based on pop culture and hobbies. A great example of this is sewing, spurred on by the Great British Sewing Bee, and similar programs. However, this has been building for some time, slowly pushing itself into mainstream culture.

But when I look back on the history of cross stitch tattoos, there’s pretty much nothing. The most well known contemporary stitcher, Mr X Stitch, has one, but its obscure enough that it might be anything… And then, from out of the blue, we hit a massive leap in interest. The below google trends record shows that in July 2015 cross stitch tattoos leap in interest. But why?

Eva Krbdk

It’s all down to Eva. She’s a Turkish tattoo artist that loves cross stitch and watercolors. Whilst most of her tattoos are watercolor based, Turkey has had a deep relationship with embroidery, and so she started getting contacted to change her stitches into tattoos. She’s been active since 2013, starting will small pieces, but recently she’s been asked to do massive pieces like the below:

What I really love is that she works with the canvas of skin in a similar way to aida. She fills in white areas, leaves space between crosses (like real aida), makes the stitches unique, but also positions the top stitch in the same direction for every cross. It’s not hard to see why Eva has such backing, and I’m happy to see it continue.

If you haven’t got your fill of tattoo images here, I would strongly suggest checking out her instagram which has both her cross stitch tattoos and awesome other tattoos.