Filip Leu

Filip Leu (born 1967 in Paris) is a Swiss tattoo artist regarded as one of the foremost large scale tattooers of his generation. He was raised inside the craft rather than drawn to it later: his parents, Felix Leu (Don Feliz) and Loretta Leu, were traveling artists who took up tattooing to support their family as they moved through Europe, North Africa, India, and Nepal, and Filip drew designs for his parents' clients as a child while the family was based in Goa. He learned to tattoo from his father, and on reaching adulthood traveled to complete his training with leading figures of the era, refining his Japanese work with Horiyoshi III in Tokyo, working for Ed Hardy at the Realistic Tattoo studio in San Francisco, and learning tattoo machine building from Paul Rogers. Joining the family studio, The Leu Family's Family Iron, in Lausanne in the mid 1980s, he developed a distinctive style described as a meeting of traditional Japanese art with a contemporary approach to traditional tattooing and biomechanical iconography, work most fully realized in large scale body suits. Beyond the needle, he contributed to the tools of the craft, developing large magnum needle groupings for saturating broad areas of ink that are now produced commercially under his name. The Leu family is widely recognized as one of the most significant European tattooing lineages, and Filip is frequently cited by peers as among the most influential tattooers working today; he continues to tattoo at the family studio, now based in Bullet, Switzerland.