| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Ivan Szazi (alias Ivaan) |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Contemporary |
| Location | São Paulo · Brazil |
| Date | 1995 CE |
| Style / Technique | Traditional Japanese irezumi and horimono bodysuits |
| Connected to | Japanese Irezumi, Horiyoshi III, Filip Leu |
Archive Note
Before the mid-1990s the Brazilian trade ran on American traditional flash, maritime symbols, and surf-counterculture motifs. There was no authentic traditional Japanese body art in South America. Ivan Szazi changed that. Around 1995 he set up a professional workspace in São Paulo and pointed his whole career at one thing: mastering classical horimono and bringing it home.
He worked big. Full backs, sleeves, body dragons. He rendered the traditional vocabulary properly, dragons, tigers, shishi lion-dogs, and celestial deities set against dense fields of wind and wave scrolls. The point was composition. Szazi treated the body as one cohesive long-term canvas instead of a scatter of small disconnected pieces, and that logic was a challenge thrown at every artist around him.
Then he published, and the work traveled further than he did. Around 2000 the Sketch Tattoo Book came out through MDZ Tattoo in São Paulo, roughly sixty-four black-and-white pages of hand-drawn Japanese compositions, dragon plates, koi in water, samurai against serpents. It circulated worldwide as a working reference for the flow and proportion of classical Japanese layouts. A second volume, a deluxe full-color monograph, was printed in Sweden through Kofuu Senjuu and Kosei Publications in a limited run of about 1500 copies, showing his finished large-scale bodysuits. Printing in Europe made the statement plain: a Brazilian could do classical Japanese work at the level of any European or North American master.
The foundation he laid in São Paulo grew a cohort. Caio Piñeiro became an internationally recognized Japanese-style artist, relocating to London to work at Kokoro Tattoo, praised for bold compositions in black, grey, and a striking red, his work logged in the Waboripedia archive. His younger brother Thomas Piñeiro, who tattoos as Horitou, was born in São Paulo and began in 2008 as Caio's apprentice. After ten years working between Europe and Brazil, Thomas moved to San Diego in 2023 to join Full Circle Tattoo, carrying the Brazilian-Japanese lineage to Southern California with a freehand approach and cohesive large-scale layouts.
The line runs wider still. Mauro Cardoso, who tattoos as Horiyamasaku, studied under Szazi in São Paulo in the late 1990s, then moved to Stockholm in the early 2000s and took ownership of the historic Swahili Bob's studio in 2005, carrying the style into Scandinavia. Hernan Coretta, an Argentinian master, traveled to São Paulo in 2001, and the Japanese-style scene Szazi had pioneered there pushed him to devote his career to classical irezumi; he later set up a private studio in San Diego.
Szazi sits at the head of all of it. One artist in São Paulo decided the human body deserved the full discipline of horimono, did the reading, did the drawing, and did the work, and the result was not a single studio but a network. From a São Paulo underground that once ran on flash, his standard now lives in London, Stockholm, and San Diego.