What was your first tattoo?

In 1998, I met a dude at the Roxy in Helsinki who played in a couple bands. I didn’t even know he was a tattoo artist at first. He did this little heart on my right wrist. That was a test to see how it would feel and what it was all about.

Obviously you passed the test.

That’s when I decided to do my whole left arm. I went from the most minimal thing to the biggest thing possible. It took months and months to finish because we were on tour a lot. Also, every time we got together we had the tendency to listen to Motörhead and get drunk. The sessions were short because it’s hard to hold a tattoo gun while totally off your head.

When did you become friends with Kat Von D?

We were working on [2005’s] Dark Light, which we recorded in Silverlake, CA. And I had an idea to have a big emblem tattooed on my back that would be the cover of the album. One of my mates told me about Kat and I didn’t know her work at all, but we set up a date at the Rainbow. The funny thing was, we were sitting next to one another for 90 minutes before noticing each other. Neither of our cells were working and then I just heard a friend of hers say, “Hey, Kat,” and I thought, Oh fuck, she’s been sitting here the whole time.

Why didn’t Kat tattoo your back for the album?

For some reason Kat and I started working on another idea, a portrait of a Finnish author named Timo Mukka on my arm. Originally, I was going to dedicate my right arm to all the authors that had inspired me. But we only got so far as to do him, Baudelaire, and Bukowski. And then I got the eyes of Edgar Allan Poe on my back. Kat did one and her ex-husband, Oliver [Peck], did the other one.

Do you and Kat see each other often?

We recorded the new record in Los Angeles, so I got to hang out with her a couple times, but she’s a busy woman and a workaholic like me, so whenever we have the chance to hang out, I don’t want to make her work. It’s been about a year since she’s done ink on my skin. There’s a picture of Klaus Kinski sucking his thumb with a naked chick that she did on the left side of my navel. He’s one of my favorite actors and one of those egomaniac lunatics that I admire. And then she also did a portrait on my breast of Maya Deren, a ’40s surrealist filmmaker.