22/05/2026
ARCHIVE 05 — GIPPI RONDINELLA
Gippi’s relationship with tattooing began long before he ever held a machine. Growing up in Rome, his earliest memories of tattooed people came from his grandfather — a former circus tightrope walker with gold earrings and faded tattoos — and from travelers returning from distant lands carrying the markings of sailors, wanderers, and men of the road.
Part of the hippie generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, became immersed in the overland traveler movement now known as the “Hippie Trail,” journeying through Istanbul, Afghanistan, India, Nepal, and Southeast Asia. Around 1970 in India, he hand-tapped his first tattoo onto an American friend — a small Om symbol made with improvised tools and youthful curiosity.
From Goa to Malta, his early machines came through encounters with old tattooists met along the road, eventually leading him toward names that would later become legends in tattoo history: Leslie Davis, Mike Malone, Ed Hardy, Felix Leu, Henk Schiffmacher and many others.
For Gippi, tattooing was never simply decoration. It was memory, ritual, travel, identity, and human experience carried on the skin.
Today, he remains one of the rare living voices bridging old European tattoo culture, traveler tattooing, and the early international tattoo movement of the 1970s and 1980s.
All photographs shared in this archive are posted respectfully and with consent, for the purpose of preserving tattoo history and cultural legacy.
