Good wind GM Fercioni, the sailor who brought tattooing to Italy

Gian Maurizio Fercioni passed away at the age of 80, leaving behind a lifelong trail of ink and sea stories. For the tattoo world he was an absolute reference point: the “daddy” of Italian tattooing, but before that he was a sailor who had salt on his back and a boat in his heart. Born and raised far from the sea, in Milan, he had found in the port of Viareggio his second home: it was there that he received his first tattoo, an anchor on his left forearm, and that he understood that that art, so linked to the life of sailors, would become his way.

A stage and costume designer in opera houses halfway across Europe, Fercioni was born in 1945 and began tattooing as early as his Liceo Artistico and Brera Academy days, eventually opening one of the very first tattoo studios in Italy, the first ever in Milan, in 1974: the Queequeg Tattoo Studio, named after the Polynesian grappler from Moby Dick, “completely tattooed,” who had electrocuted him as a boy. The studio, over the years, has become a veritable museum of tattooing: machines, needles, prints, books, memorabilia collected from the ports and alleys of Hamburg, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Marseilles, Japan and Polynesia, America. A place where anyone who wants to get close to the world of tattooing passes by sooner or later.

Your passion for the sea is also evident in your signature, head and fishbone.

leggi anche

“I who don’t sail love sailing and I’ll tell you why.”

“The lisp is a speech defect I had as a child, and I remember an English woman would come to the house and put a glass toothpick in the back of my mouth and make me say certain things, warning me that if I didn’t pronounce them right it would break in my throat. It is a method thatis no longer used today, however, it worked for me! Besides, in Viareggio ‘head and fishbone’ is a widely used saying that I’ve always liked, the meaning being ‘there’s none for no one’. The head of my fishbone then has a foul tongue like it’s making a fart, because when you pull the fish up from the bottom the swim bladder goes into its mouth and it makes a noise.

Read our interview with Gian Maurizio Fercioni conducted in 2021 at Queequeg Tattoo Studio

His profession, however, was really born on the docks. Fercioni recounted how he would arrive at the docks, roll up his sleeves to show off his tattoos and, attracting the attention of sailors, bartenders and patrons, set up a stall in the backroom or even in the cockpit of the boat to tattoo those who wanted it. Back then, those getting tattooed were “prostitutes, sailors…banditos,” as he put it, certainly not clerks in suits and ties: rough but respectful people who shared the same unwritten code of the sea. In that environment , Fercioni helped transform seafaring tattoos from a scaramantic ritual – mermaids, anchors, sailing ships with the wind in their sails, hearts and lightning bolts(some you can see in the galleries below) – to a personal language, while keeping intact its original connection to the sea.

His passion for sailing was total. “I always went sailing, I never thought about the engine,” he said, recalling his father, president of the Viareggio Nautical Club, who “would never have turned on the engine, not even dead.” As a very young skipper between fjords, Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, Fercioni had learned to live in ports, to know the boats and those who lived in them. He had built himself a lateen-sailed gozzo of just over seven meters, which he considered almost an extension of himself, and he never stopped defending the appeal of wooden boats, of handmade maintenance, of time spent in the yard as part of the fun.

For him sea and tattoos were one story: the tattooed sailor was not a pose, but a real image, born as a good luck charm in a world where “at any moment everything can change” and where respecting the sea is the only way to get by, especially when it gets bad. In his words there was always a lesson in humility: “to go boating you need a working head and arms, otherwise better to do something else.”

leggi anche

Nightmare cruises: what’s happening to the Boataround platform?

With Gian Maurizio Fercioni goes an important piece of Italian seafaring culture, a man capable of holding art, sailing and lived life together without filters. But his stories remain, and above all his drawings imprinted on the skin of thousands of people and that unmistakable way of looking at the sea, with respect and irony. Good wind GM, head and line!

Federico Rossi