the origin

cosmikali is my personal tattoo brand and artist identity: spiritually informed and energetically aligned tattooing as a vehicle for devotional practice. I have been professionally offering machine and handpoke tattoo since 2014.

Behind my tattoo practice is a channeled knowledge base I call the ‘wild mystic teachings.’ It is a kind of worldview, an awareness of how energy works, subtle and directive. I work as a guide in intimate space, not as a healer or shaman. Tattoo is alchemical work, an ancient blood-letting ceremony, and my role is to walk alongside clients as they author their own experience.

The name, the mark, the practice

The name cosmikali carries two layers of origin.

The first is divine. I had an apparition of Kali during a ceremony of releasing my mother’s ashes that I had been carrying for over four years to bring to the Himalayas, where my mother said she had seen the face of God. I was chanting on the Ganga, performing the extensive sadhana I had learned after several months at an ashram in the south of India, and when I asked if I could release her ashes to the river, the waves began to crash and Kali arose from the water. In that moment, my mother's essence, the River Ganga, and the goddess Kali all became my Ishta devata: my personal vision of God, the Cosmic Mother. Eight months later, I had the opportunity to create a small art space in front of the River Ganga. I called that space ‘cosmikali.’ When I eventually closed that space, the name became my tattoo practice name.

At its origin, cosmikali was not a public-facing brand. It was a private devotional focus, a personal development of clarity around my own divine guidance. The name held my Ishta devata, my grief, my lineage, and my direction all at once. It was mine before it was anything else.

From Ram Dass book ‘BE HERE NOW’

The second layer emerged from the work itself. I have always been a channel, as we all are, at the core. Throughout my years of travel, I would see that many friends would often want to stop and record me on their phones so they can remember what I'm saying. But whenever they'd press record, I'd lose the ability to channel that exact energy in that moment. It's an active channeling, alive and uncapturable. So the name also embodies that truth: wild because it cannot be bottled, mystical because it is grounded in a deeper energetic sense of connection and awareness than in something structured.

We are Cosmic Mirrors

mosaic from the wall of the original cosmikali space in Rishikesh, India 2015

‘wild mystic teachings’ ❖ what they are and what they are not

‘wild mystic teachings’ are the philosophy layer, anything channelled through me is part of those teachings. I am currently in the process of developing this as my concrete offerings into the world, as I begin to clarify what I have learned, earned, and want to contribute to our collective understanding.

The ‘wild mystic teachings’ are a white medicine of my ancestry, a kind of transmission of deep knowing that flow as a natural process… channeled information that trickles and then flows, first for my own benefit, and then, as people began bringing me their questions, for theirs. Throughout these many years of spiritual practice and learning, friends would come to me for guidance on their own personal matters, and I would channel guidance that was wiser than my own knowing. I was not positioned above anyone, I was always listening to this channeled information as well, as it was spoken through me for us both. We are in it together, each of us working through our own understanding.

What I offer has emerged from a lifetime of spiritual exploration, not from one lineage. I was raised in a blended spirituality household: Greek Orthodox faith, Buddhist philosophy, yogic sciences. My mother was devoted to her religion and equally curious about Eastern traditions, all while being a human developmental psychologist. So I grew up exploring different methods of working with energy. I began lucid dreaming and channeling at seven years old, astral projection at nine, and began studying Wicca at eleven. That thread never stopped. Throughout my life, I have continued to explore different spiritual traditions from around the world, and all of that has informed how I understand the body, energy, and the sacred work of mark-making.

How this teaching came to live in tattoo work

When I began tattooing in 2014, I had already done two Vipassana retreats. I noticed that people struggled to regulate their own energy during the tattoo process. So I began teaching them Anapana: observing the in and out breath as a meditation to help them ground themselves and regulate their own energy, so I wouldn't have to carry that burden for them. That's when I understood tattooing as a sacred alchemical process of transformation. It becomes a forced meditation where you must transform pain. You are transmuting something base into something elevated through intentional ceremony.

Years later, when I was doing more shamanic work in the traditions of the Shipibo of Peru, and then later with the Yawanawa people of Brasil, I would set up altars, using crystals, smoke, tobacco, and hapé to ground people and set the environment. That had its place, but it became too much for me… It actually hindered my ability to tattoo as much as I wanted. I became a guide for knowlege around shamanic work, and people began looking to me as a shaman, which I found misaligned.

We are already doing something incredibly powerful with tattoo work. When you position yourself as a shaman, people become hyper-fixated and devoted in a way that's too elevated for the work, it confuses the actual purpose. In shamanic traditions, the focus is often on power rather than ethics. I wanted to step back from what I call ‘the spiritual spectacle.’ The tattoo itself is the powerful work that I am meant to guide, in humility and grace. I can put down the feathers and the smoke, and let the blood do the work.

My ethos, my purpose

I am a servant of the divine through the alchemical process of tattoo art. I have spent many years exploring both the physical world and the depths of my energetic capacities, learning spiritual traditions from around the world, and all of that informs my tattoo practice. I am interested in bringing a grounded awareness and spiritual understanding to mark-making and the body as a poetic medium for self-expression and healing.

In 2026, I am entering a new chapter. What began as private devotion and then expanded into horizontal guidance is now moving into a more deliberate form of mentorship. I am offering guidance to others around tattooing as intentional practice, devotional work, energetic understanding of body marking, and ethical relating in the context of this work. It is a deepening of responsibility.

If you are reading this and you feel a resonance, you are welcome here. If you are curious about what intentional tattoo might offer you, I invite you to explore further. If none of this lands, that's okay too. Not everyone is meant for this work, and that is part of what makes it truly special.

Below, please enjoy some photos from the space that birthed cosmikali ink studio in Rishikesh, India in 2015… a space facing the river Ganga, that became an opportunity to develop my external offerings of gathering, ritual, reverence, and devotion through artful practice.