For Peter Maltsev, some tattoos stem from a random string of words.
“A possum eating spaghetti.”
“A zombie uterus.”
“Penguin hugging a strawberry.”
Maltsev has turned each of those haphazard combinations of words into a design for a tattoo.
An immigrant from Russia, he arrived in the U.S. about three years ago, lives in Wicker Park and works at Metamorph Tattoo.
On his @magicfingers.tattoo Instagram story, he asked his followers to send their ideas.
“Send me your coolest ideas — I’ll pick a few and draw them,” he wrote. “Let’s make something fun together!”
That’s what it’s all about: collaborating with his customers so they feel involved and connected to the art.
“I love it when they send me crazy ideas, like interesting ones, and I immediately draw them based on the description they send me,” Maltsev says in Russian. “It showcases my creativity, and I can later use these designs, and people can come and get them.”
The tattoos — many of which end up on Maltsev’s flash, or pre-drawn designs for customers to choose from — end up weird, cheeky and unique. And that’s kind of the whole point — Maltsev appreciates the levity that comes to the tattooing process through odd and peculiar designs, and his customers do, too.
But the randomness sometimes strikes a cord for his customers coincidentally. Beth Dowty, who works in a dispensary in Boston but lived in Logan Square for years, saw Maltsev’s baby dinosaur design and says it was a serendipitous twist of fate.
“Funny enough, my nickname since I was younger, with my initials being BD, ‘Baby Dino’ came about, and I’ve been collecting dinosaur trinkets and knickknacks for decades, since I was a literal child,” she says.
The design was one of Maltsev’s crowdsourced inspirations, an adorable tiny dinosaur with a bonnet and lollipop, freshly hatched from an eggshell. Dowty says she knew she had to get the tattoo.
“How often do you see, like a little baby dino being hatched out of an egg with the little shaker?” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, perfect. That’s me.’”
Dowty said she doesn’t often get flash tattoos, and she prefers to work with tattoo artists closely on a custom design. But the baby dinosaur tattoo not only had Maltsev’s fingerprints on it, but also a connection to whoever submitted the idea to his Instagram account. She was drawn to the spontaneity of deciding to get a flash tattoo and Maltsev’s tattoo style, she says.
“I thought this was just very fun and random and, you know, flying by the seat of your pants type of deal,” she says.
Tattooing can be a lonely endeavor, but by bringing in others’ ideas for inspiration, Maltsev tries to increase the collaboration. “I love bringing my own ideas to life, but I also love realizing other people’s ideas,” he says. “I love it when people get a kick out of it, when my clients and followers get to enjoy it.”
A Sun-Times series on the stories behind body art.