I was supposed to become a doctor. A swallow tattoo had other plans.

As a kid I assumed I would become a professional, maybe a doctor. That was the family plan, and for a while I tried to follow it. I went to medical school. It did not work. I went to psychology. That did.

But before all that, a tattoo had already opened something in me: a punk-rock classmate with a colorful American traditional swallow on his skin. I went home, connected to the internet through dial-up, and started searching for tattoos.

That search led me to full-body Japanese tattooing by Horiyoshi III, Yoshihito Nakano, the master from Yokohama. I did not know it yet, but horimono had already entered my life.

At 19 I got my first tattoo: a swallow inspired by that first image. I still remember the studio in Martinez: neon signs, art on the walls, the buzz of the machines, the smell of antiseptic, and tattooers laughing.

In 2014, after a tattoo convention in Buenos Aires, I decided to begin. I bought my first machines, my first pigments, and started learning. My first tattoo took seven hours on a friend's arm. It was frustrating, real, and impossible to forget.

Japanese culture had been with me since childhood: martial arts, manga, cinema, calligraphy, myths and strange creatures. When I started tattooing, all of that found its direction: I would dedicate myself to Japanese tattooing.

In Japan I searched for books, images, stories and clues about horimono. It was not always easy. In Kyoto, after I took off my jacket while eating nigiri and drinking sake, an older man pointed at me and shouted: yakuza boy. We ended up talking and laughing.

That scene says a lot about the Japanese tension around tattooing: fascination, fear, myth and misunderstanding.

After my first trip to Japan I opened a private studio in Vicente Lopez. Later I bought my own place in Olivos and rebuilt it slowly by hand, inspired by Japanese ryokan.

I did not want a street shop. I wanted a quiet, private space where a person can slow down, drink tea, talk about the piece, and enter a different rhythm before the needle appears.

I am also a psychologist, but I do not mix therapy with tattooing. In the studio, tattooing is tattooing. That background appears in the way I listen, frame the process, and read symbols.

In my podcast Tatuajes Japoneses I explore horimono, Japan and what I call Japanese cultures through psychology, philosophy, symbols and tradition. That study also supports my work as a tattooer: I do not understand Japanese tattooing as decoration, but as language.