Maggie Murray grew up with a pencil in her hand. “Even when I was watching TV, I would be sitting and drawing,” she tells me when we meet for lunch at Kleinsky’s on Cape Town’s Parliament Street. It was inevitable that she would gravitate towards a career in design. After completing her degree in Information Design at the University of Pretoria, she moved to Cape Town, where she spends her days as a graphic designer at Nine Point in the city bowl district.
Maggie’s husband Dom is the designer behind Cult of One denim. They met here in the Mother City, and Maggie describes their married life as blissful but utter chaos. “You just kind of feed off each other’s energy...look at one another’s stuff and get inspired.” The couple live in Noordhoek with their pup, Rollo, a happy threesome in a colourful home where Maggie’s art lines the walls and Dom’s embroidery thread covers the sofa.
They often collaborate on projects - he created pieces for her Rococo-styled tattoo shoot, while she designed his logo. They both picked up embroidery around the same time and worked together to embellish the decor for their wedding. The celebration itself - hosted at Colour Box Studios in November 2016 - was a veritable parade of Cape Town creatives, from the clothes to the flowers. Maggie embroidered peonies on the front of her dress, a labour of love that took her nearly 2 months to complete. “I’ve always wanted a chest piece tattoo, but I’m not brave enough, so I made my chest piece.”
Maggie wears a number of whimsical, watercolour tattoos. From the bunny on her back to the feather on her forearm, she carries her art on her skin. When she started designing her own tattoos in 2015, it felt like a natural progression from one medium to another. When she was approached to illustrate a tattoo design for an acquaintance, Maggie decided to test the waters by posting more of her art on Instagram - and found the results surprising.
“I literally drew exactly the same pictures as I would have, but I just tagged it ‘tattoo design’ and all of a sudden the following became bigger. People don’t always realise that any illustration can be used for a tattoo. When I tagged a normal watercolour picture as a tattoo design, people got excited.”
Soon, the referrals started rolling in, and Carvel was born. Named for one of the dogs she used to walk at DARG, Carvel is Maggie’s passion project, a boutique illustration brand she founded in 2013.
It was exciting to see her designs in a different medium, and Carvel continued to build momentum. But in 2015, something happened that sparked a new opportunity for the brand.
“My tattoo artist messaged me one day saying he’s moving overseas, and I was absolutely heartbroken and I couldn’t understand why. I think in my mind I always thought if there was a chance for me to learn how to tattoo it would be through this guy, and then he said he was leaving and that chance was going with him.” She took a chance and decided to train herself. It was a bold choice - trainee tattoo artists are expected to go through extended training and internships, so it was against tradition for Maggie to shortcut the process, and the equipment was no small investment a mere two months before her wedding - but Maggie got some advice from the experts and commenced her crash course.
Maggie acknowledges that a lot of people had to work their way into tattoo design from the bottom up, spending a year in a low-paying internship to learn their trade. “But as a 30-year old, I can’t fathom the idea of quitting my job and going to work in a tattoo parlour and not get paid. There are just too many bills to pay.” In Maggie’s eyes, it was a new medium - she had studied art, learned different mediums, and tattoos were a new canvas to be conquered.
Maggie’s very first tattoo: a clove of garlic on Dom’s arm. “It was the worst garlic ever,” she laughs, “it looked more like an onion, but at least it still looked like a vegetable.”
Maggie’s tattoo business has blossomed over time. “The only thing you can show to prove that you’re a tattoo artist is your portfolio,” she says, and hers has grown considerably. She takes an intimate approach to her tattoo projects, and each design goes through a series of revisions to help clients narrow down what they really want before their final visit to her studio, a peaceful sunlit room in her home. “I’d like to believe that I offer people from the get-go a chance to refine, refine, refine,” she says. “It’s about finding that balance of being more than ‘yay, I have a really cool tattoo now’ and instead feeling that the whole experience was great.”
“What I remember very well from my first tattoos was being super uncomfortable,” she says, recalling dark dingy studios where everyone dressed in black and heavy metal music was playing in the background. “It was a very manly, overcrowded place and you had to wear black and have a massive leg piece before you’re cool enough to go in there and you don’t know how to ask about the pricing system, and I remember feeling too scared to change anything on the design...I’m just gonna say yes and walk out regretting it for the rest of my life but know that I’m too scared to say no thank you.
“But that can’t be the process, it shouldn’t be like that at all. It should be like commissioning a piece of art...you have to be proud of the whole moment.”
Running a business in Cape Town is not without its challenges, however. “I find Cape Town quite overexposed in the creative industry. I mean you walk around and go ‘I’m a graphic designer’ and there’s no way you feel cool about it because the five people next to you do the exact same thing except they do 10 other things as well.”
But with her unique take on tattoo design, Maggie feels she has a niche. In an industry largely dominated by masculine style, most of her clients are women, who are drawn to her feminine, whimsical technique. Blomskollie is her hashtag of choice, an homage to her Afrikaans heritage and a reference to the delicate floral tattoos that have earned her a following of loyal clientele.
“I want to maintain my style and I would like people to come to me specifically for that. You can bring me a Pinterest picture and I could draw it for you, but that’s not what I wanna do.”
Maggie has tapped into a market for women who are looking for tattoos that are simple, beautiful, and purely feminine. As social media flutters with praise from her Blomskollies, it seems that what started as a side project will continue to blossom.