“Every tattoo is a spiritual reclaiming of my body” — In Conversation with Afnan aka @TokyoBaaby
Culture24 October 2026
AuthorMona Sharif
London's rising tattoo artist on redefining ‘Arabness’, bodily autonomy and cultural reclamation, one needle at a time. What started as an interview ended with the interviewer in her chair.
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hat started as an interview about navigating artistry through identity turned into a three-hour phone call, then the mandatory friendship initiation of pho at my favourite Shoreditch establishment, then booking in a tattoo of my own.
Afnan, 31, is a tattoo artist born and raised in Oman, formed by New York, Tokyo and now London. Her practice is rooted in questions of heritage, belonging and self-expression, drawing from her relationship with spirituality and her Afro-Arab identity.
Q: Amongst the Arab diaspora, we tend to romanticise the idea of growing up in the ‘motherland’, blaming our identity shortcomings on our geographical limitations. What are your thoughts?
“Yeah, I grew up in the ‘motherland’, but I still had to figure out where I belonged.”
Before leaving for New York at 18, Afnan grew up between different cultural worlds within one: Omani, Arab, Afro-Arab.
“It’s a bit unrealistic to assume that ethno-nationals are exempt from an identity crisis. It reduces our experiences and sanitises them into neat little boxes. We are more than a diasporic ‘wet dream’ of being one thing.”
Afnan was one of relatively few Omani nationals attending an international school at the time, moving between Western and Omani expectations. But, contrary to the familiar diaspora narrative, her identity crisis didn’t begin when she left ‘home’. It began there.
Both of her parents are Omani, yet even their experiences of Oman could not have been more different. Her mother is from Muscat; her father is from Salalah in the south. Different regions, different upbringings, different relationships to the same country. For Afnan, her relationship with her parents reflects something many of us know intimately: navigating cultural inheritance when the people passing it down to you can themselves have radically different relationships to where they come from.
She adds that she finds herself relating to the diaspora experience over the Omani one because of the dynamics of her home life.
Q: I love your style and would love to understand how you draw reference from your heritage and make it your own…
She begins by avowing that conversations around tattooing are “hush-hush”, as it is a controversial subject reminiscent of a period that has been purposely erased. What remains lives on through oral transmission and memory, rather than in Oman’s limited archives.
As a fine-line artist, Afnan is often accused of being “Westernised”, mostly by diasporic groups. She finds it almost amusing. She was raised in Oman, by Omani parents. “It doesn’t get more Arab than this.”
To add, her work is in conversation with a lineage that predates modern Western tattoo culture: deqq, a tradition found across the South-West Asian and North African (SWANA) region and most often practised on women by women.
But she doesn’t blame the diaspora, or anyone really, for having such a strong stance against it. Indigenous tattooing is rarely documented, so deqq survives mainly through oral transmission and through the bodies of grandmothers and elder relatives. Colonialism, diaspora self-sanitisation to reduce cultural visibility, religious fundamentalism and shame have all widened the distance between the practice and its people, leaving a generation disconnected from its own heritage.
“A Kurdish woman showing the variety of deqq she has on her face and arms (Haje, n.d.)”
Deqq (دق) translates literally as “to knock” or “to tap”, a reference to the sound and technique of traditional hand-poked tattooing. The practice has deep historical roots among Bedouin, Arab, Kurdish and Amazigh communities, with each group carrying its own distinct symbolism and spiritual significance.
Therefore, what survives is easily mistaken for the entirety of what once existed. Afnan’s work is less a reinvention of Arab identity than a reclamation of possibilities that may always have existed.
However, the revival of the practice is seen not in the designs, but in the process. The only way I can relay this is through my own experience.
This was my third tattoo, and from the start it felt different. When I got my first tattoo at 19, it was rushed; for the artist, it was just a routine procedure. It felt clinical, and honestly, I remember feeling underwhelmed by the experience.
Unlike at any appointment I’d had before, she channelled my energy. “No rush, no pressure,” she kept saying, and I sat there without any expectation that a needle would touch my skin. The room was peaceful. She works from a studio called Come to Church, and I hope we can appreciate the humour: a Muslim woman tattooing an agnostic woman who grew up Muslim but also went to Catholic school. It’s all a funny joke. I was allowed to bring a friend, so I brought my Kurdish Iraqi friend, who is also a gay man. We really said diaspora representation.
We took our time creating the design, and she led the next few hours with intention. I chose a dagger for my foot, an ode to my heritage and the Iraqi sword dance, a dance that symbolises bravery and freedom. Afnan decorated it with pre-Islamic rosettes, the ornamental markers traditionally seen adorning verses of the Quran, and added a fire symbol at the top of the dagger to represent me, my dad and my brother, who share the same zodiac sign: Aries.
Before she started, she said “bismillah”, meaning “in the name of God”, a small prayer. Although I’m not religious, I found it comforting. It’s something my mum would say before doing anything, and it showed she cared. The tattoo hurt, but it wasn’t excruciating, and I felt at peace. I felt her connection to me. We spoke throughout, and she could sense which areas were more sensitive than others. The tattoo machine created a tether between my skin and her artistry, and poetry was created.
She explained that although she doesn’t practise deqq or its symbolism, her revival lies in the method: “setting the tone” before, during and after. When she marks a body, she becomes part of that person’s story, a permanent fixture in it. Through tattooing, she is reviving the spiritual element that has been lost from the craft.
I left with a dagger on my foot, my family’s fire burning above it, and my mum’s bismillah still in my ears: a heritage I hadn’t been taught, only inherited.
Q: What has been the response to your more controversial pieces?
For Afnan, the controversy lies in the policing of identity and creative expression. Her designs, particularly her use of Arabic calligraphy and other Arab and Islamic motifs on Arab and Muslim bodies, challenge assumptions about which cultural symbols are allowed to remain sacred or untouched. Many of these motifs, such as the rosettes, predate Islam, but they have since become associated with it, their meanings shifting with historical context and their proximity to religion.
Afnan’s mosque design is one of her most popular, and her most contested. It has sparked heated comments and direct messages from people who argue that tattooing degrades these symbols. But as Afnan sees it, people aren’t offended by the designs themselves; they’re offended by seeing them as a tattoo on skin.
For Afnan and her clients, embracing bodily autonomy also opens creative exploration. “Creativity scares people,” she says, because it asks what else something could be, rather than accepting what it has always been told to be.
“When we let go of what we ‘should’ be, we discover the capacity of who we can be.”
By tattooing Islamic scripture, motifs, mosques and Arabic calligraphy, she creates space for these symbols to be explored outside the scope of religious and cultural sanctity and allows the body to become the archive for the revival of tattooing as well as her artistry.
Two pieces show why. The first is “Inshallah” (إن شاء الله), meaning “God willing”, written across the throat of a woman. The second is her mosque design, with “ya qamar” (يا قمر), meaning “oh moon”, beneath it. Both are contested because some interpretations of Islamic teachings prohibit tattooing. But as a Muslim woman and tattoo artist, Afnan is reclaiming that narrative and rejecting the taboo. She sees the stigmatisation of tattooing as an onslaught from Western colonialism and pan-Arabism, and the overarching cause of its decline is the desire to dilute the region’s rich histories under a singular Arab and Muslim identity.
Q: When did tattooing stop feeling like something you were doing to your body and start feeling like something you were reclaiming for yourself?
Growing up, there was little room for personal expression, let alone the permanent marking of the skin. Yet Afnan was already being read as marked: the birthmark on her nose was so often mistaken for a tattoo that she now sees it as a calling, an early sign she would become an artist. Even then, she was being scrutinised. Her aunties told her that when she was older, she could have it removed, as though a marking so natural to her being needed correcting.
It is interesting how we demonise marking by choice, seeing tattoos as defiling God’s creation, while a natural marking like her birthmark can be questioned, and its removal not just encouraged but deemed necessary.
And before she discovered the deep history of tattooing, her first tattoo, at 20, was a personal act of rebellion against everything expected of her. As the eldest daughter in an Arab Muslim household, you represent the family unit. You pave the way for what is acceptable and expected for younger relatives. Afnan states that since her first tattoo, every tattoo that followed was “a spiritual reclaiming of [her] body”. Every marking was a physical and spiritual detachment from those expectations.
Q: What does it mean to create a space where people don’t have to explain themselves?
“I’ve been tattooing visibly Muslim women, some who are also queer, hiding their queerness from their families. It’s not that these Arab identities don’t exist — we’ve just inherited the most Arab quality of it all: discretion.”
Some of her clients exist within that contradiction every day. They move between worlds, deciding which parts of themselves can be visible and which must remain private. And perhaps the most isolating part is believing that you are the only person living this way.
Leaving those environments can reveal something different: communities where the things you were taught to hide are suddenly understood. Where contradiction is not evidence of failure, but simply part of being a person.
And perhaps that is the most important thing she provides: space.
Space for people who have spent their lives negotiating how much of themselves they are allowed to take up. Sometimes, representation is not about seeing someone who looks like you. It is about encountering a space where, for once, you do not have to explain yourself.
Q: What’s next for Tokyo Baaby?
“You’ll have to wait and see.”
