Elena Graglia

I started to show interest in tattooing when I was getting work done back in Italy at the shop where Sem Boy Lee works. That’s when I started drawing more consistently and created my first drawing book. Sem Boy suggested I bought a coil machine from Alberto Tarchi, a machine builder from Tuscany. Super excited about finally having my own coil to play with, I immediately started practicing on fake skin and secondly on myself. When I got a little bit more confident in the process I extended my practice on trusting friends. Snowboarding has been a priority in the last decade of my life and I was frequently participating to events and competitions. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I could pack tattoo supplies in my board bag and travel from country to country. This gave me the opportunity of making lots of practice on newly made friends and people that would I would cross paths with. This was going very well and I was having a great time until, after landing in Calgary for a snowboard trip, Covid started. And needless to say that traveling stopped. After the first lockdown, my husband found an ad of a tattoo shop looking for a new resident artist. I applied and I got the job. I worked at Atticus for about a year and had an amazing experience with lots of walk-ins and projects I would have never thought I would be able to do. It most definitely broadened my horizons. I decided to move on in order to have the opportunity to manage my own schedule. Fox and the Machine was the next step in my Canadian adventure and had a great time working alongside Chris Spence beautiful work. Life took a brief turn and I moved to a remote island (Gabriola) for a few months. When time of moving back to Calgary came around, I took a sip of courage and messaged Ryan Gagné. He agreed in letting me tattoo out of Stronghold and started shortly after. I can definitely tell that working beside him and having his guidance already impacted my designs and techniques.