Like graffiti mags, tattoo zines are a genre of magazine that haven’t offered much in the way of innovative editorial. Both genre are invariably full of poor quality photographs of random examples of work that are fascinating to devotees of the respective forms but are of little interest to anyone else – they preach to the converted and don’t reach out to non-fanatics.

So the pilot issue of Sang Bleu comes as a pleasant surprise. It’s a well designed, large format magazine that has applied an editorial framework to its subject, in the process transcending its slightly backstreet roots and reflecting the mainstream acceptability tattooing. This is tattoo as art; black and white images do away with what would have been a sea of badly printed flesh tones, and artists sketches for proposed designs are given full page coverage.