Deven Smith

Denver based visual artist working across tattooing, drawing, painting, and photography. Originally from Telluride, Colorado, trained at Master Tattoo Institute in Miami Beach. Currently working as a tattoo artist at Illustrative Studios in Denver and operating independently under the brand 6ixblades. My work pulls from vintage cartoons, baroque ornamentation, realist portraiture, and dark surrealism, images that sit somewhere between nostalgia and unease, beauty and its distortion. I tattoo gothic architecture onto people. My photography sees subjects halfway into a different world. I paint characters from the cartoons of my childhood and give them the weight of everything that came after.

Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, Denver CO — Illustration, 2020–2021
Master Tattoo Institute, Miami Beach FL — Professional Tattooing and Piercing, 2021–2023

Aqui Art Show, Denver CO — 2025