Born in Pereira, between the mountains and the rivers of Colombia. Divorced parents, several siblings, and a childhood he remembers as free — free above all to be himself. His father drew; his mother and his uncle lived for music. Before he could name any of it, his family had already given him the two things the work would need: technique to admire, and permission to be authentic.
1995
At eleven he found graffiti. He was winning drawing contests at school, painting murals for the neighbourhood, and getting paid for some of them. Realising he could make a living from what he already loved changed everything. With that money he funded his next idea: printing shirts to sell to his classmates.
2006
At fifteen he finished school, got his first tattoo, and bought a machine of his own. He knew almost immediately that it had been a mistake: skin is not paper — it reacts, and it belongs to someone. There were no courses back then, and the tattooers of the time guarded what they knew.
2010
He enrols in Fine Arts at the Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira. Chiaroscuro, volume, anatomy — and an emphasis in sculpture that taught him to read form in three dimensions, not only as light and shadow on paper. He paid for the first semester; merit covered the next four and a half years.
2012
He grew close to his professors — first assisting them, then standing in when they couldn't teach. The work paid: not much, but enough to live on, and all of it from his own hands. He fell for teaching there, and never let it go. The seminars he gives today started in that classroom.
2014
At twenty he met the woman who is now his wife. Eleven years later, she has been beside every project — building pieces with him back in the academy, and every step of the career that came after.
2015
With the academy behind him, he understood it was time to carry everything he had learned into tattooing — and to give it his whole focus. Ten months in a studio of his own with two friends, and then the best studio in the city came for him. There he watched professionals work: how they built a piece, what tools they used, how they thought.
2017
Buga, his first convention. He entered the category he wanted to explore and took first place — proof that building on academic foundations had been the right bet. He shot two photographs that weekend, the finished tattoo and the award, because the rest of the time he was working. Those two earned him his first sponsor, Proton Stencil, which he still carries today.
2018
More conventions across the country, each one demanding more of him than the last. He kept exhibiting and taking commissions, but the focus had narrowed. He wanted to stand out in tattooing, and he was willing to spend years doing it.
2019
The national circuit stopped being enough. He made contacts online and travelled to Germany, Spain and Sweden — visiting studios, learning how the industry worked elsewhere, walking through the museums of classical art, and working beside artists he had admired from a distance. He watched them admire his work back.
2020
By then he was being invited to judge conventions, and his position carried authority. Noble Art invited him to New York. It took him nine months to answer — he had always pictured Europe, for the life and for the art history. His wife was the one who saw it clearly: New York is where the best in the world gather.
2023
Clients who let him create freely. Seminars where he hands over the method instead of guarding it, because a craft only rises when everyone in it does. And a clothing house he is building in the United States — the same idea he had at eleven, printing shirts for his classmates. Identity, he says, can be worn in more than one way.
2026