| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Chris O'Donnell |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Contemporary |
| Location | Kings Avenue Tattoo, 188 Bowery, Manhattan, New York, USA |
| Date | 1993 CE |
| Style / Technique | large-scale Japanese-influenced bodywork in the American Japanese-style revival |
| Connected to | Grime, Filip Leu, Mike Rubendall |
Archive Note
Chris O'Donnell began tattooing in 1993, at seventeen years old. He came up in the early 1990s in Richmond, Virginia, where his earliest documented professional contact in the trade was the tattooer Timothy Hoyer. By one published account O'Donnell was already tattooing when the two met, so the relationship worked as informal mentorship rather than a formal apprenticeship. Hoyer let him watch the work and shared technical knowledge about machines. Secondhand summaries that call O'Donnell "Hoyer's apprentice" should be read with that nuance.
From Richmond he moved toward what would define him: large-format Japanese-influenced compositions, built around flow, negative space, and traditional motif construction. His public Instagram, @codonnell_nyc, documents that body of work. The approach situates him inside the broader American Japanese-style revival, the same current that runs through Mike Rubendall at Kings Avenue, Bill Canales at Full Circle, and Filip Leu in Switzerland.
The studio that carries his name is Saved Tattoo in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he is a co-owner. Saved was founded by Scott Campbell around 2004 to 2005, and its artist stable has historically included O'Donnell, Campbell, Stephanie Tamez, and Michelle Tarantelli. The shop became one of the studios most identified with the Brooklyn fine-art tattoo wave of the 2000s and 2010s, and CBS New York counted it among the city's best parlors on the strength of that roster. Whether O'Donnell was an original co-founder, and the exact founding year, remain to be pinned from shop archives and period press.
He never worked only one room. O'Donnell has held a long-standing guest seat at Kings Avenue Tattoo in Manhattan, keeping cross-shop ties inside the New York Japanese-style community, and he runs a private studio in Pound Ridge, New York. Big Tattoo Planet profiled him under the headline "NY King," focused on his large-format Japanese-influenced work. On the Books Closed podcast, episode 003, he talked through his drawing process, the early adoption of social media in the tattoo industry, and how the New York scene shifted across the 1990s and 2000s.
Much of his lasting record is on paper. Afterlife Press published Drawings for Tattoos Volume 1 and Volume 2, art books collecting his outlines, sketches, and color studies, also distributed through Black Claw. Volume 1 reproduces over one hundred pages with layered vellum that pairs a line outline against the color study underneath. Volume 2 gathers over three hundred original color illustrations. The vellum format is the point: it shows the work as a tattooer thinks it, line first, then color laid behind.
He also sits near the start of the Afterlife Press catalog. O'Donnell was a co-featured artist, alongside Grime, in Afterlife Vol. I in 2017, the press's inaugural book, a limited run of one thousand copies. In Disintegration 1, the first issue of the press's editorial journal, he returned to Timothy Hoyer for an extended conversation on the origins and evolution of biomechanical tattooing, closing a loop with the man who first showed him a machine in Richmond.
What O'Donnell represents is a specific New York lineage: a Richmond start under informal mentorship, a move into large-scale Japanese-style bodywork, and a co-owner's stake in one of the Brooklyn studios that defined American fine-art tattooing in the 2000s. His birth year, hometown, and pre-1993 life are not surfaced in the reputable sources reviewed, and that part of the record stays open.