Kirk Nilsen was born in 1987 in the historical town of New Brunswick in New Jersey, USA. Nilsen has always been involved in creative pursuits, spending several years performing in international music acts and designing album covers for bands and record labels.
He apprenticed himself to an older tattoo artist and began experimenting with dot work and cross hatching styles to create interesting textures and gradients. His style now heavily features sacred geometry and patterns that resemble those found in Buddhist and Hindi art works. Nilsen creates contrast in his tattoo designs by using lines of different thicknesses as well as area of dot work. His tattoos have beautiful visual textures that can capture a viewer and keep them interested in the design.
Kirk Nilsen uses a lot of mandalas in his tattoo designs, sometimes overlapping several mandalas to create a sleeve tattoo, sometimes combining the mandalas with animals or skulls. A mandala is sometimes called a flower of life, so when the mandala contains skulls, it creates an interesting harmony between the themes of life and death.
Altogether, Kirk Nilsen’s tattoos are not just superficially beautiful; they also explore the deeper nature of the universe, the balance between order and chaos, light and dark and the ever-present questions surrounding life and death.
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