8.5” x 6” x 1.5” August 2021

Materials: design binding in tan goat skin, leather hinges and flyleaf/pastedown paper by Maziarczyk Paperworks. Tattooed with black ink. Sewn silk end bands. Custom clamshell box.

The design binding of Dark Archives started with the question ‘What if…’. What if I could tattoo a book? Can you even tattoo a book? How can I be respectful of the contents of the book while learning a completely different trade? With those questions, and armed with imagery from the book and a new tattoo gun, I pursued a tattoo salon in my bindery. Blowing up the title, mirroring it made it feel like a chest or forearm tattoo while making the corner tattoos felt ornamental to traditional book design. Merging the two fields was a joy to learn and conveying what I wanted with Dark Archives.