| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Hernan Coretta |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Contemporary |
| Location | Buenos Aires, Argentina |
| Date | 1993 CE |
| Style / Technique | Traditional Japanese irezumi (horimono) in large-scale, flow-focused compositions |
| Connected to | Japanese Irezumi, Mariano Antonio, Ivan Szazi (alias Ivaan) |
Archive Note
Hernan Coretta was born in Argentina in 1975, when wearing tattoos still marked you as an outsider. He got his first one at fourteen, in 1989, and by 1993 he had turned the obsession into a profession in Buenos Aires. There was no clean path into it. The work lived inside the skateboarding and punk rock scenes, the only places body modification was welcome in 1990s Argentina, and the artists learned by failing in public. They built their own equipment and mixed their own colorants because the supply chain simply did not exist. Coretta out-worked the scarcity and became a fixture of the Argentine underground.
The turn came in 2001. He and his partner went to a convention in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and for the first time he saw traditional Japanese irezumi up close, the large full body designs that move with the body instead of fighting it. That was the moment. He decided on the spot to give the rest of his career to the classical Japanese tradition, and he went back to the source material to do it right, studying woodblock prints, mythology, and old paintings.
For the next eleven years he chased the craft across Europe. From 2001 to 2012 Coretta worked in Madrid and Barcelona, Milan and Rome, London, and Frankfurt, absorbing how the European masters handled scale and flow. He came out the other side with his own register: traditional Japanese conventions carried by modern, distinctive linework, every composition built around the way a pattern moves over the natural contours of the body.
Back in Buenos Aires he committed fully to large-scale work, back pieces and full sleeves, and that became his signature. To document it he teamed up with Daniel Martino and the publisher Arte Tattoo Books. On March 25, 2017, the bilingual monograph Coretta: The Art of Hernan Coretta came out in Buenos Aires, a luxury volume limited to 1500 numbered copies running over three hundred pages of his history, paintings, and high detail photographs. It remains a key reference for anyone serious about modern irezumi.
In 2023 he pulled up and moved to the United States. He relocated from Buenos Aires to San Diego with his partner and fellow artist Salome Sajnin, and joined Guru Tattoo, one of the most respected studios in California. From 2023 to 2024 he worked the Guru bench, drawing clients from across North America who came specifically for his large-scale Japanese compositions and his meticulous, flow-focused approach.
Then he built his own room. In late 2024 he and Salome Sajnin opened a private, appointment-only studio called The Classic Flow Tattoo, in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego, on Cass Street. By appointment only, the place lets him sink fully into custom, large-scale Japanese projects. From a punk kid building machines in 1990s Buenos Aires to a master with his own private California studio, Coretta turned three decades of international travel into a single coherent style, and clients now fly to that one coastal address to wear it.