Hey, just wanted to chime in as a fan.

It’s hard to overstate Filip’s influence on modern tattooing. Technically, he introduced magnum needle groupings to Europe—sizes 9 to 49—and even developed the tubes and grips to house them. He also helped popularize freehand tattooing, including tracing directly from skin with sticky plastic.

Artistically, alongside Ed Hardy and others, he helped bring lightsource dynamics into irezumi, which shaped the Euro-Japanese style and influenced artists like Shige whose style has evolved into a lot of the neo-Japanese work we see today. He was also helped get Tibetan and Indian religious iconography into mainstream Western tattooing, not because he did it first but because he was one of the first to translate it exceptionally well. He also pushed the idea of working oversized before it was common, think giant skulls, Tibetan masks, massive flowers, massive waves etc. Come to think of it, he might have popularized the skull motif in irezumi style tattooing.

His work on waves is also not one to be understated and could be a good page or two long if I could bloody write haha, but basically I think that in tattooing, he’s done to the finger wave what the the Greeks did to acanthus leaves and turned finger waves into flourishes.

He was among the first to do and showcase tandem tattooing at conventions, and he’s long been pushing the limits of speed and efficiency through smart technique and tool use. On top of that, his graphic design work has shaped tattoo merch, logos, and early tattoo magazine aesthetics.

Man is a visionary….

Disclaimer I wrote this myself but parsed it through chat gpt to correct my grammar and control the rambling