About me
My name is Jonatal Carducci,
I am a tattoo artist born in 1977 in Pieve Torina, a small town in the outback of the Marche Region who got hit by a terrible earthquake in 2016.
I live in Loreto, I have one Tattoo studio in Tolentino near Macerata and one in Loreto near Ancona.
I have a great passion for sacred tattoos.
I got my first tattoo in 1996 in an historical Italian studio; that was my first contact with this fascinating world and everything started from there!
My curiosity and the fascination I got from this ancient technique led me to deepen my knowledge on this subject.
I increasingly got more involved by attending tattoo conventions worldwide and getting more tattoos done both in Italy and around the world. I finally opened my own studio – called Jona Tattoo Art – in 2002 in Tolentino.
From 2002 I started to collect anything to do with tattoos, like utensils used in various parts of the world for tattoos done with several techniques (i.e. tebori, tatau etc), paintings and flash of famous tattoo artists and pioneers of tattoos of every age and country.
I knew that our territory, and Loreto in particular, had its own tattoo history.
I gathered more information and afterwards I reproduced the moulds used by the markers in Loreto; they used these moulds to impress sacred images onto the skin of pilgrims who visited the Sanctuary. After impressing the image they incised the skin with a 3-tipped needle soaked with ink. This was the pilgrims souvenir from the pilgrimage in Loreto.
The first tattoos date back to the crusades.
Crusaders tattooed themselves with sacred symbols as an identification sign so that if they were to be killed in a battle they would have received a Christian burial.
Tattoos were also a distinctive sign for those who professed to be Christians.
I reproduced the moulds trying to restore this ancient practice. I can execute sacred tattoos safely in my studio using both the ancient manual technique as well as the modern one using the tattoo machine.
I hope that this project of mine is useful to spread the knowledge on such a relevant historical aspect of The Marche tattoo history.
“A tattoo is the expression of our soul”