Canal Street is not where you’d expect to find one of New York’s most talked-about tattoo studios. It’s a street better known for knock-off handbags, discount electronics, and foot traffic that has somewhere better to be.
But at number 52 Canal Street, between the noise and the hustle, First Class Tattoos by Mikhail Andersson has been quietly building a reputation that pulls clients in from across the country and further.
Mikhail Andersson was born in Moscow on May 13, 1988. Tattoo culture was taboo where he grew up. People who had tattoos were mostly associated with gangs or bikers, but the idea of art on skin intrigued him. He got his first tattoo at 17 and tattooed himself on his own leg. That intrigued teenager grew up to leave the country for it.
When Andersson opened First Class Tattoos in 2016, Canal Street wasn’t exactly a destination for body art. When he first arrived, the city was close to impossible to break into. Health department regulations meant most shops wouldn’t even take guest artists, let alone newcomers. So, he spent two years in Miami instead, working through shops there while the city was at its peak of tattoo tourism.
The motivation for building his own studio went beyond finances. He had been consistently unsatisfied with other studio environments. He often felt disappointed working at other studios, and many days would rather stay home than deal with where he’d worked before. So he pulled away from other shops.
By the time he made it to New York for good, he knew what he was doing. However, the first year was rough for Andersson—debt, reinvestment, not much margin for error. He kept going. Now, nearly a decade later, the studio has gained national media attention, including a feature on Fox 5 New York.
First Class Tattoos is not a one-man operation, even if Mikhail Andersson is the name people search for. Andersson built the studio specifically to house serious tattoo artists. Black and grey realism, color realism, Japanese traditional, neo-traditional, fine line, watercolor, surrealism, trash polka, anime, and abstract. The studio recently expanded to include a full-time piercer and laser tattoo removal.
The idea was always to be a place where a client at any level, with any vision, could find the right artist for what they had in mind.
Here, Mikhail Andersson is most associated with color realism, but the clients who know his work know that’s only part of the picture. His portfolio proves that he is capable of so much more, with a diverse range of styles and techniques.
Andersson’s background in graphic design gave him a foundation in composition and color theory that most tattoo artists don’t have. His hand-drawing practice, developed long before digital tools became the default, gives his work a quality that’s hard to replicate on a screen and harder to fake on skin.
Outside the studio, he shoots. Photography became a serious practice during the COVID shutdown in 2020, when the studio was closed for four months, and he had time to pick up a camera and go outside. He says it changed how he sees things.
First Class Tattoos is a premier studio located on a bustling street filled with other tattoo parlors, but what sets it apart is the intentional choice of clients who seek out the expertise of Mikhail. It means they looked for Mikhail Andersson, or they looked for the best tattoo studio in New York and found him.
“I’m happy with how far things have come,” Mikhail Andersson says. “But I don’t really see it as something finished. There’s always more to learn, more to understand about the craft. If you stop learning, you stop growing, and in this work, that doesn’t really work. For me, it’s still a long road ahead.”
