Mark Bode has been a professional comic artist since 1978 when at the age of 15 he was the youngest artist to be published in HEAVY METAL MAGAZINE. He attended the School of Visual Arts in NYC. He has worked on his own comic strips as well as his fathers (underground comic artist Vaughn Bode) material for MARVEL COMICS among dozens of other publications. Mark started tattooing in 1995 under a very popular old-school biker tattooist by the name of Al Valenta in New England, who was a fan of Vaughn Bodes? Cheech Wizard. Al offered to teach Mark the basics of the tattoo arts. After a period of three years Mark felt frustrated with the limits of the medium and ended up almost quitting tattooing all together. That's when fellow comic artist and tattooist master Myke Maldonado from NYC (now in PA) stepped in to teach Mark the difference between a tattoo artist and an artist that tattoos. Under Myke, Mark began to pay more attention to the subtleties of line and style and he began to mimic the styles of other artists and began to paint with the tattoo machine. Since then Mark has tattooed in Amsterdam, Milan, London, and Barcelona. Mark has said: "There is a big difference between a tattoo artist and an artist that tattoos. First there is the complete absence of flash art when the artist can draw directly on the person or ahead of time on paper and begin the layering of multiple sessions. Two, with an illustrator the sky is the limit. You take what you have learned to do on paper, the customer chooses a style to do the piece in, then you envision how the piece will look completed on the body. The difficulty of tattooing has made my own art style stronger and tattooing has become a passion and an endless source of learning and gratification." Mark has tattooed extensively in New England and New York City and now resides in San Francisco.