A new photobook reframes tattoo culture through what usually stays out of view: preparation, waiting, touch, and the small gestures that make the session feel ceremonial.
Hannah Guyer has spent years inside The Church of England, the London tattoo studio she co founded and helps run day to day. From that proximity, she developed Modern Rituals, a photobook that chooses the process over the finished tattoo.
The images stay with the 99 per cent that rarely gets seen. Skin wrapped after a session, ink on gloves, stencils half aligned, tools placed and replaced, bodies waiting in that suspended time where commitment has already happened but the result has not. What emerges is not a gallery of designs, but a study of duration. Tattooing appears as a shared ritual built on trust, pain management, conversation, silence, and the focused work of hands.
Guyer also photographs a community without turning it into a scene. Artists and clients move through the studio as equals, connected by attention rather than performance. The book’s insistence on print matters here. It slows the images down, lifts them out of the scroll, and gives this culture a form that can be handled, returned to, and kept.
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