The drawings kind of look like I just sat down and tossed off some random scribble but there really is a lot of tweaking and editing along the way. And even though it happens quite quickly and looks effortless, that is only possible thanks to years of drawing, editing and critiquing.

The background to my style is this: My natural tendency is to be a bit of a control freak and perfectionist, which doesn't inspire spontaneous creativity as you tend to overthink everything. So back in the 90s, I was living in central London and set myself a task of sorts. I decided to grab a big fat marker pen and head out into the night and make some drawings. This kind of set me some necessary limitations as the cops don't like you running around drawing on public spaces, so you have to work fast. Without even realizing it, I'd kind of found my own visual voice so to speak and had my own style.

I then started to incorporate this looseness into my paintings in preliminary drawings for my paintings where you'd still see the linework visible in some parts of the paintings but eventually my experiments with painting moved away from line as I started to use the same "Loose" principles in my handling of paint and the drawing part just happened with the brush rather than the pen and the looseness became the key and the line not so important.

Fast forward to the present and my control freakish tendencies helped me get a handle on the endless technical and mechanical aspects of tattooing. As I'm sure you're aware, it's very demanding to learn all that stuff. But I've finally reached a point now where I was kind of on top of all that and could put it to the back of my mind and concentrate more on what I can do creatively with the medium, and because line is so important to a good tattoo holding up over time, I naturally started to think about my drawing style and how I could apply it to tattooing.

It didn't seem obvious at first or even possible as I'd really had to relearn to draw for tattooing and my usual style contradicted everything I'd been taught. But deep down I knew it could work. After all there's lots of line movement so the line is always changing direction, which is good (no straight lines); there are lines crossing over each other everywhere, which breaks up large flat areas so you're not having to shade vast areas of flesh and trying to get it even. Plus you can play fast and loose with how you shade things. You still want to give the correct overall impression of three dimensions but you don't have to be exactly literal with directions of shading or depth, etc. So it's kind of liberating. I love it.

Good thing I was able to hang out with French tattooer Noon for a few weeks before getting him to sit down for an interview. So instead of a nice and neat little Q and A, you get a nice and neat little quasi-article from some feverishly taken notes before Noon booked for more international travels. And while it seems Noon is constantly on the move, he's made a semi-permanent home at Tattoo Culture in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, usually returning twice a year.

Recently featured in the May issue of Total Tattoo, Noon has created a style instantly recognizable and completely his own. It's something I'd rather let him describe, though he plainly says, "It's difficult to explain. I would say it's minimalist, it's singular. I don't know if there's a real name for this. The way I started was with the idea that the tattoo could be finished with only the line."

Growing up in a town full of ex-cons and gypsies, Noon's studied how they tattooed. "I watched them attach needles to pencils and set the ink bottle on a small plate over a flame. Very basic. I was young and in the poor part of town. All the guys there were tattooed and tattooing all the time. So I watched them. And at ten years old, I already knew how they did it. There was no color, no fill, only the line."

Noon's gypsy education could only go so far. He retained the basics and began to learn himself. He explains, "There were no magazines, no Internet. So in 1996 I got the address of Mickey Sharpz in London and I bought everything I could! I practiced on myself, I was always on the phone with Lionel (from Out of Step Tattoo) and we'd go back and forth asking 'How do you do this?' 'What's working for you?' It was not so easy then."