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Chris Trevino (Horimana)

Large-format traditional Japanese (wabori) with a Texas traditional register

Perfection Tattoo, Austin, Texas

Chris Trevino, given the name Horimana by Horiyoshi III in 2005, is the Austin tattooer most often cited in English-language press as the principal practitioner of large-format traditional Japanese tattooing in the American South. He owns Perfection Tattoo in Austin and is a recurring guest at Three Tides in Osaka.

Archive Note

Trevino, not to be confused with Carlos Trevino, was raised in San Antonio and apprenticed under Bob Moreau there in the 1980s, when local tattooing was restricted and conducted under the cover of "art services." He owns Perfection Tattoo on Guadalupe Street in Austin, a shop in the Moreau to Dave Lum to Trevino succession that Moreau founded in 1978 and handed to Lum in 1984. From 2001 he began regular working travel to Japan, and after roughly four years the Yokohama irezumi master Horiyoshi III gave him the honorary name Horimana in 2005; he is a recurring guest artist at Three Tides Tattoo in Osaka, where his guest spots, alongside Chris Garver's, are documented as having shaped the early-2000s formation of the senior Three Tides artist Mutsuo. His large-format bodysuit work was collected in the 2010 monograph Gods and Warriors: Horimana, published by Tattoo Artist Magazine with a foreword by Don Ed Hardy, and he was profiled in his own Vice Tattoo Age episode in 2018, which framed him as a tattooer who bridges a Texas traditional look and large-format Japanese work. Sources describe him as the most consistently cited Southern practitioner of traditional Japanese tattooing rather than the first.

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