Deconstructing fantasy into a secret gust of wind led by anime babes and soft gestures, Arne Asaumi’s warm liminality stretches over skin and flesh with a strong sense of movement. Hawai’i-Midwest transplant and non-binary legend Arne Asaumi (@secretbunny_holdhand) speaks to Coeval Magazine about their tattooing process, conjuring space, and the relationships we nurture with our bodies.

What got you started tattooing? How did you come to your practice?
I initially wanted to teach myself to tattoo to distract myself from the tech-heavy and stressful practices I was developing in school. I slowly became familiar with skin as a living texture and surface, soon learning to be comfortable working with other people's bodies to make tattoos. The act and knowledge of the tattooing process grounded me through the many identity breakdowns and breakthroughs I've had in the past few years—knowing how to make my skin feel like it belongs to me made me want to share my work with people who wanted to strengthen their relationships with their bodies as well, along with friends and people who were drawn to my work.

Where do you draw influences?
I'm not often inspired by tangible objects or other art, but I have always relied on my feelings and experiences to guide my hand when I sit down to draw flash.

What aspects of your environment inform your style?
A quiet day drifting around the streets and neighborhoods in Honolulu, sitting down at a small coffee shop and listening to music, and finding a shaded spot in a secluded garden are some of my favorite experiences to gather inspiration from. Secrets, warmth, and soft chibi figures are what I try to evoke and keep floating around in the back of my head when I draw with the intention of making potential tattoos.

You have a way with assembling means for the fluid to take form that so many of your clients are attracted to, fans and friends alike. How might these secrets and visions of warmth and softness summon space to craft and draw your flash?
I think secrets, warmth, and softness are keys in the form of safety and comfort that unlock my "drawing" mode, usually buried in my brain, which in some ways feels like a "true self" (as silly as that sounds). I've been drawing as a hobby since childhood—in some ways it's the only thing that's developed into a refined version of itself, while the rest of me seems to endlessly and restlessly shift and put on/take off layers of itself.

My drawings feel deeply personal because through them I'm revealing the only parts of me that feel real. It feels like I'm telling people little secrets about me when I draw for myself. When I draw flash, however, I tend to distance myself from the content a little, instead prioritizing the shape and feel of each flash design with the intention of creating a little gift for someone else to house on their body—something that they can nourish with meanings and secrets of their own.

How does your visual language engage with this fluidity? Or, fluidity has many forms, endless, where does flesh end for you and secrets begin?
Fluidity isn't something I really think about when I draw, in fact I often think things I draw end up looking stiff or rigid, but if there's some fluid nature in my drawings, it probably unconsciously comes from not feelings right "here" or "there." Culturally, physically, gender-wise, and just in general, I'm constantly hovering between vastly different places, unable to find a home for myself because I exist in the space between spaces. Feeling unanchored to myself and to the people and places I exist in creates fluidity in the way I see things, in the work I do, and provides flexibility with going from paper to skin. Not that paper and skin feel the same to me, it's more like an intuition leading my hand that comes from wanting to see my drawings translated into a simpler version of themselves on someone else's body, combined with not feeling tied to any one technique or coming from a specific tattooing background (being self-taught).

Bending and folding parts of yourself to fit into cracks and tiny spaces is important when surviving in a socially conservative place like Hawai`i, which is why tattooing has become a tool that helps me unbend and unfold parts of myself, like an extension of drawing that provides a different sense of meaningfulness. Instead of my drawing practice, where I'm able to express a secret self that I can't articulate otherwise, tattooing is something that lets me share a secret comfort with other people.