What is the meaning behind Alexander Volkov's back tattoo?
Alexander Volkov's massive back tattoo depicts a Samurai helmet. The artwork is fundamentally based on the confrontation between life and death. According to Volkov's tattoo artist, Maxim Kislitsyn, the Samurai helmet embodies the two alienable essences of being.
Per Kislitsyn, the massive back tattoo took two weeks to complete. Upon completion, the Moscow-based tattoo artist hailed Alexander Volkov's mental grit for sitting through 55 hours to get the back piece done. Check out Kislitsyn's post below:
Alexander Volkov first entered the UFC octagon with his brand new tattoo at UFC 254 against Walt Harris. Following his second-round KO victory over Harris, 'Drago' addressed his Samurai helmet back tattoo during the post-fight press conference:
“It was really painful, it was (expletive) painful. He did say, ‘You want to do this? You’re sure?’ And I said, ‘I’m sure. I don’t have time. I just need to go to camp for my first time.’ So he said, ‘OK – two weeks.'”
He added:
“Every day, he was making a tattoo and it was so painful,” Volkov said. “First, for five days it was OK because it takes all day. But the next week was really terrible. I was whining and crying, but I wanted to finish this. I wanted to go to my next fight with a full-made tattoo. But it was a really hard challenge in my life. I don’t want do tattoo more.”
Refusing to take the easy route and finish the tattoo in separate parts, Alexander Volkov chose to get the tattoo done in one go.
“My mind, I don’t like anything that’s not finished,” Volkov said. “I like that everything is finished. For me, it’s bad to go to the fights and have a tattoo (not done). I just wanted to finish everything and go to the camp. So this says something about me and my mind.”
In one of his Instagram posts, Volkov claimed that his back tattoo essentially represented his alter ego. He wrote in the caption:
"My alter ego. It's watching you!."
About Alexander Volkov's tattoo artist Maxim Kislitsyn
Maxim Kislitsyn, who made Alexander Volkov's famous tattoo, is a renowned Russian artist who operates from Moscow, Russia. He took his first steps into tattoo art when he was 16. Kislitsyn desired to have a tattoo and got himself one with rudimentary equipment like sewing needles and ink.
While he did not like the result of his first assignment, the Russian decided to learn the craft and became a prominent figure in the industry. Now in his mid-30s, Kislitsyn has been tattooing professionally for nearly 15 years.
In a 2018 interview with inkppl.com, Kislitsyn said that he also tried different jobs while learning tattoo art simultaneously:
"I actually tried a lot of things. When I was a student, I even worked in a nightclub. Then, for 4 months, I worked at a factory in my specialty. I am a master of carpentry and furniture production, and in parallel, I comprehended the art and skill of tattooing." [H/T inkppl.com]
Stylistically, Kislitsyn works with Japanese aesthetics. He uses neo-traditional Japanese tattoos with Japanese motifs. He prefers to describe it as Neo-Japanese oriental and Europeanized or Americanized tattoos. He believes that the Japanese style shows how tattoo art interacts with the human body and how you can fit the drawing into a part of the body. His work usually revolves around large-scale images, similar to Alexander Volkov's back tattoo.