At Amsterdam's Rembrandt House, a Tattoo Gun Replaced the Etching Needle

By Daniel Okafor

For nearly two weeks, the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam echoed with a sound Rembrandt van Rijn never heard: a tattoo gun. The man holding it was Henk Schiffmacher, a renowned Dutch tattoo artist whose clients include the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam and Lady Gaga.

This time his subjects were not famous musicians. They were museum visitors who managed to grab an appointment.

The museum — set in the house where Rembrandt lived for 19 years — hosted Schiffmacher as he inked the 17th-century painter's sketches onto arms, backs and legs. The tattoos cost between €100 and €350. Customers chose from dozens of authentic Rembrandt drawings, not the full-color masterworks everyone knows from textbooks.

"We worked for almost two weeks straight, every day, making small Rembrandts," Schiffmacher told NPR's Scott Detrow and Sacha Pfeiffer.

What did visitors get inked?

The menu was strictly Rembrandt, and strictly monochrome:

• Windmills — "we did more than one windmill"
• Lions
• Elephants
• One full Rembrandt etching, copied across a customer's entire back

That last one is not a routine job. Schiffmacher noted the canvas matters: "Not too much pimples, not too — strange — no scars, no other tattoos."

Does the building still carry the painter?

Schiffmacher thinks so. "You just jump back a couple of ages into time, and you're in this time machine," he said of working in the house. "And he ain't home, of course, but his spirit is still in the woodworks of this building."

As for whether that spirit would approve of sketches becoming skin art — Schiffmacher has an opinion. "I personally think he would like it. He was a very curious type of person," he said, adding, with a laugh: "I don't know if he could have learned how to tattoo."

Why Rembrandt, for a Dutch tattoo artist?

In the Netherlands, Rembrandt is unavoidable. Schiffmacher traced his own artistic education back to childhood sketches and a grandfather looking over his shoulder.

"That's a real Rembrandt," the grandfather would say. "I can say that he changed me," Schiffmacher recalled.

Decades later, he is extending that legacy at a fraction of the price of an original — an etching needle swapped for a tattoo machine, the paper swapped for people.

Schiffmacher frames the exchange plainly. "We create a piece of art which is on a person, which is affordable and stays with the customer, and it's also the only art form you're taking to the grave."

The exhibit has now wrapped up at the Rembrandt House. The tattoos, as tattoos do, could last forever — which is longer than most museum loans.