Meet Pícara Clavel

We recently connected with Pícara Clavel and have shared our conversation below.

Pícara, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

Being an independent artist in this world is never easy. No matter how successful you get to be, there are always going to be set backs and things that challenge you, your patience and even your self-esteem and wellbeing. There are months that look better than others, whether it is financially, creatively or even personally. I think the most important thing is to always keep your goal in mind and let go of your ego. Comparison is the biggest threat for most creatives in the present time, whether it is to others or yourself. We get bombed with a lot of information everyday and if you work with social media, as I do, it really never stops. What I’ve learned is to always try to see the positive side of things, I know it can get hard sometimes, but theres always something to be grateful for. That doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to complain or struggle, by all means, do that! But it’s important to snap out of it as well, look around, look at what you’ve accomplished and say, “you know what? I’m still doing great”. Its very easy to give up when things go wrong, what’s truly hard is to keep your head up and your focus clear. That’s what has helped me become a very well known and successful tattoo artist, it’s what’s helped me keep going and try to be one of the best out there every single day. I know what I want and I know the only person capable of stoping me from achieving anything is myself.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

Tattooing didn’t come as a surprise to me, it was something that had been in the back of my mind ever since I was in high school. After a very inspiring and beautiful but also turbulent and frustrating career in design, one day I made the risky decision to finally do it. I bought everything I needed and started practicing in my dining room table. To my surprise it came really easy for me, like it was something I was meant to do. A week after that I asked my brother If I could tattoo him. That was one of the scariest moments of my journey. Messing it up wasn’t an option and I really felt the pressure of that. The one thing that made it all worth it was seeing the final result, the look of amazement on my brothers face, knowing it was my first tattoo and that it was definitely not going to be the last.

As of today I can confidently call myself a tattoo artist, which at some point in my life felt very idealistic. My style of tattooing is called microrealism and I focus mostly on antique and ornate designs, anything from glass to metal and with very intricate detail. I’ve always been drawn to vintage aesthetics, I love objects that tell stories and being able to reflect that in my art today is very rewarding. Seeing the look on someones face when they see their new tattoo and immediately recognize their grandma’s perfume bottle immortalised on their skin forever reminds me every single day of how powerful art is and how lucky I am of doing what I love and live out of my passion.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Determination
By the time I decided to start tattooing I had my mind fully set to it. I knew where I wanted to go and that helped me prioritize the things that needed to be done to get there. That meant making sacrifices and also investing in my dream. Yes, there are always going to be set backs because not everything is under your control, but I made sure to keep my mind set to my goal and, in fact, I still do, because I know that whether I have already achieved a lot, my journey is far for being over, its a work in process and as long as i’m doing this, it’s going to keep being that way. I’m determined to keep following this dream every single day and that makes me very exited about the future.

Patience
There’s no shortcut to success, or at least theres not one that will pay off forever. I’ve always been a very patient person and I believe you have to let time take its course in order for things to fall into place correctly. When I started my journey I had a clear vision of what I wanted to achieve. The truth is, when you start something, whatever it is, and you have a goal in mind, at the time you reach that goal you probably would start seeing a lot of different paths to achieve new goals in your head. Success is not linear and whether it has a starting point it doesn’t have and end one necessarily. Thats why being patient with yourself and your process is very important, otherwise you’ll start feeling frustrated and overwhelmed at some point, which will end up with you quitting your dream.

Organization
With whatever it is that you do in life, theres much more to it than what people see. For example, with tattooing, the actual tattoo process is just the tip of the iceberg of the entire equation. What people don’t see is actually what makes my work possible. Answering peoples requests, managing my bookings, making the designs, editing pictures, planning content for my social media, keep up with posing stories and answering comments, these are all things that take a lot of time as well but need to be done in order for me to be able to get to my studio every day and do a tattoo on someone. Thats why putting everything in order to do all of this things is very important for me to keep doing what I love, and being as organized as possible is crucial for everything to have its right place on my schedule.

If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?

I think in a creative journey challenges are what truly helps up evolve and be better at what we do. We sometimes wish the water was always calm and easy to navigate, when in reality facing obstacles is makes us face our fears, what makes us shift and adjust, what really helps us learn and evolve. Right now I think my biggest challenge is balancing my personal life and my work life. I believe without having time to decompress in your personal life, you’ll eventually start burning out work-wise. But like I said, its all about balance. You can’t really let your personal life become a distraction when it comes to your professional goals and it works the same the other way around. and for me that manifests in procrastinating. Even though I am a very organized person, I do get overwhelmed sometimes and I tend to procrastinate things that Im scared of facing, whether it is because I don’t know what the right way to navigate a certain situation is, or if its just a creative block, I sometimes struggle like we all do. But like I said previously, I know if I’m sure of what I want to achieve in life as a tattoo artist and also as a person, facing this kind of obstacles and successfully learning to overcome them will only make me grow in a way that having an uneventful journey will never do.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @picaraclavel
• Other: Tiktok: picaraclavel