| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Bernie Luther |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Contemporary |
| Location | Vienna, Austria |
| Date | 1987 CE |
| Style / Technique | Freehand custom tattooing drawn straight onto the skin, across many styles |
| Connected to | Olly Furze, Guy Le Tatooer, George Bone |
Archive Note
Bernie Luther was born in 1965 in Vienna, Austria. He came to tattooing through the punk scene. He built his first tattoo machine at 16 and, by his own account, has not stopped tattooing since. In 1987 he opened Tattoo Demon in Vienna. The shop is widely described as the oldest tattoo studio still operating in the city, a claim repeated across his own pages and Austrian tattoo directories. It sits at Turnergasse 15 in the 15th district, Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus. Sources say the studio has occupied the Turnergasse address since 1987, moving into the north wing of the building in 1989.
Luther traveled to learn. He worked across Europe in the mid 1980s and visited the United States through the mid 1990s, picking up technique from a range of tattooers along the way. In 1994 he opened a second shop in Bali and co-owned it for about ten years. His son Joel was born in 1993 and his son Jeremy was born in Bali in 1995, which fixes part of that decade to the island.
His trade reputation rests on freehand work. He draws designs straight onto the skin rather than relying on stencils, and Austrian directories single this out as his signature. Reports credit him with a large run of convention prizes. One account states he has taken more than two hundred awards at conventions worldwide, and that he was twice named Tattoo Artist of the Year and once Tattoo Artist of the Decade. These award counts come mainly from promotional summaries and should be read as reported rather than independently audited.
Luther works in more than one medium. Alongside tattooing he paints, takes photographs, and makes gig posters for live music, a thread that runs back to his roots in the punk scene. In recent years he gathered this range of work into a book titled "Tattoo Demon", issued through Tribal Publishing and described as his first book. The book marks about forty years of tattooing and collects a selection of his tattoos, paintings, photographs, and posters.
At more than forty years behind the machine, Luther is one of the longer-running tattooers in the German-speaking scene. He has framed Tattoo Demon against what he calls commercial mass processing, holding to one-off custom work and freehand drawing over walk-in flash. The shop keeps short weekday hours and stays closed on weekends, which fits the by-appointment, custom-only way he describes the work. For a tattooer who started by bending his own machine together as a teenager, the throughline is plain. He still draws on people by hand, in the same district, under the same name.