Growing up, Patrick Berube’s mother modelled an artist’s life for him, dipping her creativity into oil paints, water colours, pencil drawings and even cake decorating. Perpetually obsessed with tattoos, intrigued by their sentimentality, their bravery and their permanence, Patrick remembers “being a child and my mom would draw a Boeing 747 plane on my arm and I thought I was badass, you know.”
So it’s no surprise at that, at 15 years old, with tattoo magazines spread out for inspiration, Patrick would steal his mother’s Prismacolor pencils and draw his own tattoo designs on tracing paper, relishing the “vibrant and creamy” colours that made his drawings pop. “My favourite colour was a turquoise or a teal,” he says, “because I couldn’t believe you could put that in skin and it would look like that.”
