Meet the Artist: Woozy Machine

Woozy Machine is a resident artist at Parliament Tattoo in North London, where he specialises in illustrative tattooing.

Describe your style as if it were a type of noise.

Let's have the sound of a washing machine, chuck a few lasers in there, and then like an old man groaning when he gets off the couch. Then maybe someone high-fiving, which is a non-ironic high five. Okay, that's probably enough.

How did you come up with the name Woozy Machine?

Woozy Machine goes back to my years of making art exhibitions. I had a solo show at the Frieze Art Fair, and one of the pieces was made up of about 100 drawings pushed together, titled “Woozy Machine.”

For me, a Woozy Machine is a description of what it is to be human. We’re sort of computational, programmed to act in certain ways through genetics and the like, but we also do so much subconsciously. We don’t really know why we do it, we just do. So in that sense we’re programmed, but we’re not. We’re a bit like a drunk computer, a drunk machine. I thought of “Woozy Machine” as my description of a human being, or even a poem about a robot. It’s not a great name for a tattooer, admittedly, but I already had it at the time, so when I opened the Instagram account, I just used that.

What is your favourite thing about working at Parliament?

I like all the free biscuits. I like that you’re allowed to drink as much tea and coffee as you want all day long. And I like the light. I’ve worked in a lot of spaces where there’s not good light. I like the people, too, and I’ve seen iterations of Parliament over the years.

How long have you been here?

I’ve been tattooing here at Parliament since 2020. So that’s 26,000 years, I think. Is that right? I’m not good with math. But yeah, it’ll be seven years in January.

What's the one thing clients should know before booking that they never do?

That if the Milky Way were shrunk to the size of the Earth, then the Earth would be only the size of a single atom.

Do you have any favourite subjects you like tattooing?

Just stuff that's come from inside my own skull. I'm not massively into doing custom, but I will do it if I can work with it. Um, I like drawing comic panels. I like the interaction of one person and another person. That's a relentlessly blank canvas all the time. Like, I like putting one character in front of another character, and what is this? What's going on here? And there's just infinite possibilities.

To make an appointment please email woozybooking@gmail.com