Chicago tattoo artist Cheyenne Enderson finds a niche in realistic patch tattoos

Tattoo artists see bodies as canvases, but Cheyenne Enderson’s work looks like it should be on cloth.

The 23-year-old Chicago tattoo artist has found a niche creating tattoos that look like they were embroidered with a needle and thread onto the skin even though they’re done with the same ink and needle any traditional tattoo requires.

She started drawing in high school and has long been interested in realism, taking something that exists in real life and making it into art. Now, she’s a tattoo artist at Lucky Kat Tat, 677 N. Milwaukee Ave.

When a client asked whether a realistic patch might be in her skill set in 2021, she took that as a challenge.

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Enderson says there’s “a big difference from now to then.”

From florals to cartoon characters, her pieces can take hours to complete.

The process includes sketching individual lines that only just slightly overlap one another to create the stitch effect while taking care not to overwork the skin. She adds shadows and other small details to make the patches appear three-dimensional.

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“It’s this sequence of trying to figure out the contrast between each thread,” Enderson says.

Enderson’s most challenging patch tattoo so far was one for Saad Aziz, 31.

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His tattoo was an incredibly detailed Polynesian-style piece on his back. The circular symbol includes a whale and a shark, positioned in a yin-and-yang formation.

He was inspired to get the sea creatures after learning of their symbolism during his travels to Bali.

“A whale really symbolize omnipresence, something so vast that it’s behind comprehension,” Aziz says. “That’s juxtaposed against a shark, which never stops swimming. Since the day it’s born, it keeps going, so there’s a lot of vitality in the shark symbol.”

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Aziz, who’s a trained lawyer now working in pharmaceuticals, came across patch-style tattoos online. But the artists he loved were based in Brazil or Spain. It wasn’t until he came across Enderson’s page online that he found someone nearby who could complete the tattoos with the level of detail he was seeking.

“She minimizes it, but I swear she’s super-talented,” Aziz says. “I don’t think she understands because it comes intuitively to her.”

The three-dimensional patch took seven hours for Enderson to complete.

“She shaded it in such a way where it’s overlapping existing parts of my tattoo, so it looks like it’s raised off the surface,” Aziz says.

Since then, more clients have come to Enderson for her impressive patch pieces.

“I love the details,” Enderson says. “I’ve always loved trying to figure that part out, it keeps me in the zone.”

For Chicagoans wanting to pay permanent homage to the city, Enderson has done patch tattoos with nods to Chicago institutions, including Bears, Bulls and White Sox logos that look like they could have been stitched onto a hat instead of on her clients’ skin.

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For Jordan Guerrero, Enderson’s boyfriend of nine years and her biggest supporter and longest-standing client, she inked a Chi South Side patch and a Bulls logo that looks like it could have been stitched onto Michael Jordan’s jersey.

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The embroidery style has gained popularity in recent years, and Enderson said she’s found inspiration in the work of other artists specializing in the style.

Alicia Casale has been one of those inspirations — her embroidery tattoos draw inspiration from her home of Mexico, with bright pigments and traditional imagery. Other inspirations for Enderson include Eduardo Lozano Barreto and Fernanda Ramirez.

Now, clients are seeking out Enderson to get their patch tattoos in Chicago, usually through social media and word of mouth. But she says it took a lot as a young female tattoo artist to get to this point.

“I’ve had some people worried in the beginning, like, ‘How old are you, how long have you been doing this? I don’t think I want you tattooing me,’ ” Enderson says.

She says she started tattooing friends in high school with a kit she got on eBay and decided to pursue tattooing instead of nursing school like she had originally planned.

After being turned away from one tattoo shop because they “don’t teach girls,” Enderson found one where she got help to hone her craft.

Enderson’s goal is to work her own culture into her tattoos. Her mother is from the Philippines, and she’s always been interested in classical lace styles, something she’s been interested into transferring into tattoo work.

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A Sun-Times series on the stories behind body art.