BRUNELLA . AKA BRU SIMOES
Welcome and thanks for your interest in my work. I’ll try to make this sweet and short for you :)
I’m born and raised in Brazil and my interest in art began from very a young age.
I was the dorky kid, glasses on, going to oil painting classes at age 8. Constantly drawing or painting around the house, and grew up nagging my mom about getting tattoos. These are absolutely my earliest memories.
Because of that, I always knew I was growing up to do something related to arts, but not even in my wildest dreams, being a successful tattoo artist was in my mind.
You see, I’m a child of the 80’s, from a very small town in Brazil. I had my apprenticeship in the early 2000’s (2006 to be exact) and back then being a tattoo artist wasn’t considered an option. You wouldn’t look up to be one.
Yet again, there I was at age 21 asking to become an apprentice at my local tattoo shop. Since then, 16 years went by and I’m glad and proud of everything achieved. When I started, the tattooing industry was vastly different from what you know today, male dominated and very hard to infiltrate. That is why for a good chunk of my tattooing years I was tattooing out of my private shop in Brazil, and also constantly traveling so I could make connections and learn as much as I possible could.
That I did. I traveled everywhere, tattooed a whole lot of people and that gave me the confidence and stretched the horizon for me. It was there and then that I knew I needed to take a leap of faith and embrace the unknown in order to evolve in my work.
Aiming to move to NYC after a few days working in the city, I ended up moving to Amsterdam instead, my absolute favourite place on earth. There I found a shop to call it home - Salon Serpent Parlour, under the wing of Angelique Houtkamp where I stayed from 2018 to 2021.
Needless to say that it was a time of huge personal and professional growth. I had the chance to share my days with great artists and visibly learned a lot. I was immensely happy there, but with the same mindset as before, I knew there was much more room for me to grow.
That’s when I made the decision of moving countries again to start from scratch, this time in Melbourne, Australia.
And this is where you’ll find me now, seeking for my personal best and to give the best qualities tattoos I can.
Art is in my true essence and I wouldn’t know how to do anything else other than create. Tattooing has giving me the opportunity to live through that and I couldn’t be more grateful and appreciative of this craftsmanship. Bottom line is, I have a whole lot of respect for this profession, all the old schoolers that opened up doors allowing us to be recognized as artists. And of course, all of you, wanting and choosing our art to be eternal on your skin.
