Barbara Corbucci
I tattoo paintings.
Full colour, built over several sessions. Much of what I do is the faithful rendering of paintings — the impressionists and post-impressionists above all — and large botanical projects, where the detail and the movement of the colour carry the whole piece.
I trained at the Istituto d'Arte and took my degree in interior architecture. For eight years I designed buildings and exhibition spaces in Rome. Composition, proportion, the way a form sits in the space it is given — I learned all of it before I ever picked up a machine.
Ten years ago I moved to skin. What I wanted was a way of working that allowed no second attempt, and this is it: full colour, on a living surface, once.
I am also a painter. My own work belongs to informal abstraction, in conversation with Alberto Burri and Antoni Tàpies — pigment built in layers, cracked, overlaid, the surface itself doing the telling. Every mark holds the time, the imperfection and the beauty of the unfinished.
My paintings have been shown in New York, Dubai, Beijing, Monaco, Vienna and Venice. I have held solo exhibitions at the Torretta Valadier in Rome and at F6 The Open Factory in Vienna, and have won the Rorarte and Artemida Art Week prizes. In 2025 my work received formal valuation recognition under the Italian art market system.
Saying it now saves us both a conversation.
You write. I read every enquiry myself.
The practical answer. Within 12 to 24 hours my booking manager comes back to you with what the project would cost and when I could do it.
The deposit. 20% of the project, capped at €1,000. The date is yours from that moment. Only now do you book your flight.
The piece. Now that the day is held, you and I talk properly about what we are going to make.
The drawings. Ten to twelve days before your session I send you my sketches. Ask me to change them. There is no separate design fee — it is already in what you have paid.
The session. One client a day. You.
Based on the scale and the complexity of the project. Nothing changes because of where you live.
In October 2025 I held a solo show at F6 The Open Factory in Vienna, and tattooed during it. Connie and Thomas were among the people I worked on. This is what they made of it — unprompted.
“I found it very interesting that she comes from the artist's side, not the tattooing side.”
“Tattooing is art in itself. Being tattooed inside an art exhibition is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
My paintings hang on the walls of the room where I tattoo. I designed it for the way I want to work: a kitchen with a chef who cooks your lunch, somewhere quiet to sit between the hours, and nobody else being tattooed that day. Everything in it that makes the day easier is already included.
It is also a room other artists want to work in. Some of the best tattooers in Europe come here as my guests, when I invite them.
Frascati is twenty-five minutes from Rome, in the hills to the southeast — papal villas, white wine, and the place Romans have been escaping to since the sixteenth century. Ciampino airport is twenty-five minutes away; Fiumicino about forty.
If you have been to Rome you know what the traffic is like. Out here the centre is half an hour by train and none of that is your problem — and you get the hills as well, which most visitors never think to look for.
I also work from a second studio in Verona. If that suits you better, say so when you write.
I read all of these myself. Within 12 to 24 hours my booking manager will come back to you with the practical part — what it would cost, and when I could do it. Once that works, you and I talk about the piece.