ENJOY: AUSTIN MAPLES

For over three years, Afterlife worked with tattoo artist Austin Maples to create Enjoy: Austin Maples, a publication that grew beyond its origins as a book to something we have come to describe as a ‘tactile reading experience’. Enjoy is a combination of original content provided by Austin (including 500 original flash designs, photography, and reflections on art + life) as well as interviews and stories from tattoo luminaries who know Austin well.

All aspects of Enjoy: Austin Maples–from the foil-stamped wrap to the embossed cover to the variety of papers used to the physical dimensions of the book itself–were curated to tell Austin’s story and to transmit a part of tattoo history as well.

Examples of this include:

The use of vellum hearkens back to the pre-iPad days of tattoo design when all tattoos were drawn on vellum or tracing paper and then refined through a series of edits and layers until the final version was ready to transfer to skin. In a more wide-ranging artistic sense, vellum is the origin of the ‘layers’ utilized in digital design software such as Adobe.

Austin is well known for exclusively working with black ink to tattoo his iconic pieces. To reinforce the strength and gravitas of Austin’s work, Enjoy has printed never-before-seen imagery of Austin’s large-scale back pieces on a heavyweight thick matte paper.