Paintings of Tattoo Guns from a Mexican Prison

Will­ing­ly spend­ing two months in a Mex­i­can prison and col­lab­o­rat­ing with the inmates, artist Scott Camp­bell built tat­too machines out of what­ev­er was avail­able, but they were nev­er meant to last. In his project Things Get Bet­ter, they became a med­i­ta­tion on inge­nu­ity, con­straint, and sur­vival.

Scott Campbell’s 2013 project Things Get Bet­ter is intro­duced on his web­site with a sin­gle, dis­arm­ing­ly plain sen­tence: “Two months, 17 Walk­man motors, and what­ev­er I could find inside the walls of a prison in Mex­i­co.” It’s a sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, but it also accu­rate­ly gets across what actu­al­ly hap­pened to cre­ate one of the most inge­nious projects inside con­tem­po­rary tat­too cul­ture of the last 20 years. What began as an act of curios­i­ty, Campbell’s inter­est in prison tat­too cul­ture, ulti­mate­ly became a med­i­ta­tion on inge­nu­ity, iden­ti­ty, and the way cre­ativ­i­ty behaves under extreme lim­i­ta­tion.

As one of the world’s most high-pro­file tat­too artists, Camp­bel­l’s first celebri­ty client was Heath Ledger, and grew to include a star-stud­ded ros­ter of names includ­ing Robert Downey Jr, Marc Jacobs, Court­ney Love, Howard Stern, and Sting, to name a few. How­ev­er, his ear­ly career in San Fran­cis­co work­ing at a tat­too shop run by a meth deal­er while moon­light­ing as a copy edi­tor for Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti at the famous City Lights book­store tells us he was nev­er a stranger to going low when he want­ed to. In his own words, “I’ve tat­tooed mur­der­ous bik­ers who kill peo­ple for a liv­ing and Jen­nifer Anis­ton – and every­thing in between.”

Nat­u­ral­ly, the choice to will­ing­ly spend rough­ly two months inside a prison in Mex­i­co City, an envi­ron­ment defined by restric­tion, monot­o­ny, and a bit of cor­rup­tion, seems like a nat­ur­al cre­ative choice. The goal? Get to know the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion and work with them to build tat­too machines with what­ev­er is avail­able, give them tat­toos, and record the results.

Prison life, by design, is a place where indi­vid­u­al­i­ty is large­ly stripped from the inmate; tat­too­ing, in this con­text, takes on a grav­i­ty that is large­ly absent from the main­stream tat­too world. Tat­toos are no longer acces­sories or sta­tus sym­bols, they are asser­tions of self­hood. Camp­bell under­stood this and want­ed to see it for him­self. “I did­n’t real­ly know why I was there … I just went there out of my own curios­i­ty and end­ed up becom­ing friend­ly with a lot of the inmates and when they heard I was a tat­too­er, they all want­ed to get tat­tooed so we start­ed build­ing these lit­tle Franken­stein tat­too­ing machines out of what­ev­er we could find.”

Camp­bell did not enter the prison as a for­mal artist-in-res­i­dence or with insti­tu­tion­al back­ing. Mex­i­can prison reg­u­la­tions, more flex­i­ble and more nego­tiable than those in the Unit­ed States, made the project pos­si­ble, though not straight­for­ward. He could not bring pro­fes­sion­al tat­too equip­ment inside, so he did what incar­cer­at­ed tat­too­ers around the world have always done: he impro­vised. Accord­ing to the artist, it took some cre­ative workarounds to get every­thing into place. “I’d buy the war­den a nice bot­tle of scotch and got his sec­re­tary some flow­ers and that made things a lot eas­i­er. I donat­ed all these things to the prison, like VCRs and gui­tars, and once we got onto the oth­er side we’d take them all apart and make them into machines.”

The guards hav­ing turned a blind eye, Camp­bell got togeth­er with the inmates and built func­tion­ing tat­too machines from what­ev­er mate­ri­als were avail­able or could be qui­et­ly intro­duced as dona­tions, some­times scav­eng­ing sec­ond-hand stores and sal­vage yards for any elec­tron­ics he could find. Elec­tric motors were scav­enged from Walk­mans and elec­tric razors; nee­dles were fash­ioned from gui­tar strings and safe­ty pins; grips emerged from tooth­brush­es, plas­tic uten­sils, lighters, and even a melt­ed half of a Grate­ful Dead cas­sette tape, with every­thing often held togeth­er with noth­ing but pack­ing tape and a prayer.

More than a tech­ni­cal explo­ration, the project took on a social ele­ment. The machines were built col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly. More impor­tant­ly, each machine was made for a sin­gle indi­vid­ual and then dis­card­ed. This was part­ly prac­ti­cal, min­i­miz­ing the risk of cross-con­t­a­m­i­na­tion in an envi­ron­ment with­out prop­er ster­il­iza­tion, but it also imbued each object with a sin­gu­lar, almost cer­e­mo­ni­al char­ac­ter, tai­lored to every indi­vid­ual receiv­ing a tat­too. These were tem­po­rary instru­ments to facil­i­tate an exchange, exist­ing only long enough to leave a mark on one body.

Camp­bell began to notice some­thing unex­pect­ed: the machines them­selves were com­pelling objects. Jury-rigged and frag­ile, held togeth­er by rub­ber and ten­sion, they reflect­ed a kind of forced inven­tive­ness that felt both bru­tal and ele­gant. He referred to them as “Franken­guns,” a term that cap­tures their stitched-togeth­er qual­i­ty as well as their uneasy vital­i­ty. They were machines built under pres­sure, but also arti­facts of care, skill, and com­mu­nal prob­lem-solv­ing.

After leav­ing the prison, Camp­bell returned to these objects, not phys­i­cal­ly, but con­cep­tu­al­ly. The result was Things Get Bet­ter, a series of large-scale water­col­or and black ink paint­ings depict­ing the impro­vised tat­too machines in iso­la­tion. Removed from the prison envi­ron­ment and the bod­ies they once marked, the machines become some­thing else entire­ly: stud­ies in struc­ture, bal­ance, and adap­ta­tion.

Exe­cut­ed pri­mar­i­ly in black ink and water­col­or, the paint­ings avoid dra­ma or embell­ish­ment. This restraint is cru­cial. Camp­bell chose water­col­or pre­cise­ly because of its unfor­giv­ing nature: once a stroke is laid down, it can­not be erased or dis­guised. The medi­um mir­rors the con­di­tions of both prison tat­too­ing and incar­cer­a­tion itself, there is no undo func­tion, no clean slate.

Visu­al­ly, the machines begin to resem­ble archi­tec­tur­al frag­ments or skele­tal sys­tems. Wires loop like ten­dons; motors sit like hearts; bind­ings read as lig­a­ments hold­ing the entire organ­ism togeth­er. Some works feel almost dia­gram­mat­ic, while oth­ers verge on sur­re­al­ism. Scale plays a role here as well: enlarged to six by eight feet in some cas­es, the machines lose their orig­i­nal hand-held inti­ma­cy and take on a mon­u­men­tal pres­ence. What was once impro­vised and dis­pos­able becomes impos­ing and per­ma­nent.

This trans­for­ma­tion from tool to sym­bol, is cen­tral to the project. Camp­bell is not roman­ti­ciz­ing prison life, nor is he glo­ri­fy­ing hard­ship. Instead, he iso­lates a spe­cif­ic phe­nom­e­non: how con­straint sharp­ens inven­tion. “The machines real­ly became beau­ti­ful sym­bols of the inge­nu­ity and human­i­ty that you find in a place that’s that oppres­sive.” In the absence of prop­er mate­ri­als, cre­ativ­i­ty becomes intense­ly prag­mat­ic. Solu­tions must work, not mere­ly look good. A tat­too machine that fails mid-line is not a con­cep­tu­al exper­i­ment, it is a prob­lem that must be solved imme­di­ate­ly. “There has been more than one occa­sion where peo­ple have come in for stu­dio vis­its and they’ve walked out with a bleed­ing arm or ankle.” Imper­fec­tion is a recur­ring theme through­out the project. Tat­toos made with impro­vised machines bleed. Lines wob­ble. Heal­ing is unpre­dictable. Camp­bell does not deny this; he embraces it. “Per­fect isn’t always the point,” he has said.

This empha­sis on prob­lem-solv­ing places Things Get Bet­ter in con­ver­sa­tion with design, engi­neer­ing, and even archi­tec­ture as much as with tat­too­ing or fine art. Camp­bell has spo­ken about how, over time, he began to approach the machines them­selves as works of art, arrang­ing mate­ri­als for visu­al rhythm as much as for func­tion. “ ‘They were reflec­tive of mak­ing things out of such lim­it­ed resources, and I want­ed to give them more of a pres­ence and pow­er. Soon I was build­ing the machines with a paint­ing mind. I would make these con­struc­tions as com­po­si­tions, incor­po­rat­ing dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als or repeat­ed parts to cre­ate a motif.”

The project also marked a con­scious rejec­tion of the con­tem­po­rary tat­too industry’s grow­ing slick­ness. By 2013, tat­too­ing had become thor­ough­ly main­stream: tele­vised com­pe­ti­tions, celebri­ty tat­too artists, brand­ed stu­dios, and social media-friend­ly aes­thet­ics dom­i­nat­ed the field. Camp­bell, who found­ed the Brook­lyn stu­dio Saved Tat­too, was deeply embed­ded in that world. Things Get Bet­ter emerged, by his own admis­sion, as a cor­rec­tive. “I was look­ing for a way to fall in love with tat­too­ing again,” he said. Prison tat­too cul­ture, with its risks, imper­fec­tions, and stakes, offered that renew­al.

Exhib­it­ed at OHWOW Gallery (now known as Moran Moran) in Los Ange­les, the series was pre­sent­ed not as doc­u­men­tary evi­dence but as a cohe­sive body of fine art. There are no bod­ies in the paint­ings, no prison inte­ri­ors, no overt nar­ra­tive cues. Instead, view­ers are left to infer the con­di­tions that pro­duced these objects. This dis­tance is delib­er­ate. By strip­ping away con­text, Camp­bell allows the machines to func­tion as uni­ver­sal sym­bols of adap­ta­tion, objects that are not from any one par­tic­u­lar part of the world, but instead could belong to any envi­ron­ment where resources are scarce and inge­nu­ity is manda­to­ry. He even proved this point in a video with Casey Nei­s­tat, where he cre­at­ed a tat­too gun from parts he found or bought while walk­ing around New York, well worth watch­ing.

The title Things Get Bet­ter is often read iron­i­cal­ly, but it resists easy cyn­i­cism. It does not promise progress or redemp­tion; it states a sim­ple, almost stub­born belief in human adapt­abil­i­ty. In places where sys­tems fail or resources dis­ap­pear, peo­ple still make things work. They still build, mark, com­mu­ni­cate, and assert their iden­ti­ties.

Ulti­mate­ly, this project sits at an unusu­al inter­sec­tion of tat­too cul­ture, con­cep­tu­al art, and social obser­va­tion. It nei­ther sen­sa­tion­al­izes prison life nor san­i­tizes it. Instead, it iso­lates a sin­gle, telling phe­nom­e­non: the trans­for­ma­tion of dis­card­ed mate­ri­als into mean­ing­ful tools, and then into art. By ele­vat­ing impro­vised tat­too machines into paint­ed stud­ies, Scott Camp­bell reframes “doing more with less” or con­straint itself as a gen­er­a­tive force, one capa­ble of pro­duc­ing not only sur­vival, but beau­ty, struc­ture, and qui­et resilience.

In doing so, the project asks an uncom­fort­able but nec­es­sary ques­tion: what does cre­ativ­i­ty look like when com­fort, abun­dance, and pol­ish are removed? The answer is stripped down, impro­vised, imper­fect, and pro­found­ly human.