A family business

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 | By Emily Pacey

Clingfilm wraps the chairs to guard them from blood and ink, and skin-thin paper drawings rustle on the walls of tattoo parlour The Family Business. This shop’s Mafia-style name chimes with Italian owner Mo Copoletta’s slightly sinister personal style.

Tattooed by The Family Business, a new book out in September from Pavilion Books, is a hymn to one of London’s most famous tattoo parlours. The book, designed by Steve Russell, is loaded with photos by Fredi Marcarini documenting the shop’s rich interior, brilliant artists and legions of heavily tattooed patrons.

The book’s hundreds of seductive pictures drip with exotic ephemera of the tattooist’s art, and pore-close detail of vibrantly coloured waves, fish, demons, snakes, birds, Virgin Marys - and especially strikingly - 1950s sci-fi film poster imagery. Confirmed blank canvasses may feel their resolution shaken.