Bangkok bartenders celebrate their body art with Giffard’s Spirit of Art

[ruby_title]Fon Kongjun, Sole Rouge[/ruby_title]

“When you serve cocktails, you need to explain the concept or story behind the cocktail – where the inspiration is from and why you did it like that. It’s the same for tattoos. It’s storytelling for guests. Before I started as a bartender, I used to like art very much. In my free time I used to go to art museums and exhibitions. Many of my friends are photographers, and my parents are very hippy, and we had a lot of art at our home. So I wanted to get a tattoo and saw ‘The Creation of Adam’ by Michelangelo, which I really liked. My moon was drawn by a friend who is a tattoo artist, but it was made after we drank a lot of Martinis at a friend’s bar. The bartender there [Carson from Iron Balls] had his own tattoo machine, so my friend got down to work.

The roman numerals are the date when I started bartending. Hopefully next month I’ll get two new tattoos: one on my neck, a red coloured Chinese word, and the other one somewhere I can hide it. It will be a beautiful girl seducing a devil. The devil is wearing a priest’s uniform to pretend that he’s good, but actually he’s bad inside. The girl will be holding a knife behind her back, which she’ll kill him with. So it’s like irony.”