Xiaoling Li, professionally known as “Ling is eel,” is an award-winning tattoo artist and illustrator based in New York City whose practice moves fluidly between skin, paper, and canvas. She brings to her work a multicultural sensibility that bridges illustration, fine art, and tattooing, and she treats the human body not simply as a surface but as a site of myth-making and revelation. After earning her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts in 2020, Li quickly developed a body of work that has been recognized with multiple awards and presented in numerous exhibitions. She has shared platforms with well-known tattoo artists in curated shows, underscoring how her studio practice stands out within the broader tattoo landscape.
Working from the studio in New York, Li has developed a style that resists easy categorization: dreamlike yet architectural, fluid yet razor-sharp. At first glance, her tattoos feel less like adornment and more like ritual inscription, as if the human body were both page and temple wall. This sensibility places her outside the common stylistic schools of contemporary tattooing—bold neo-traditionalism, photorealism, minimalist fine-line—and into a space closer to visionary drawing or dream-psychology illustration. Critics and clients alike often remark on the unmistakable aura of her work, which functions as both intimate ornament and philosophical statement.
Central to that aura is her mastery of line. Instead of the blunt outlines of conventional tattooing, Li draws with fine, whiplash contours that seem to expand and contract with the rhythm of breathing, suggesting that each tattoo lives in synchrony with its wearer. In some pieces a fairy unfurls across a ribcage or a vase of flowers climbs up an arm, the line tensile and sinuous like vines or smoke trails. In other works—particularly the symmetrical chest or spine designs—the same line hardens into an architectural character reminiscent of Gothic tracery or Renaissance engraving, building palaces out of filigree that swell into abstracted wings, tendrils, or flames. This dual nature—both organic and structural—anchors her style and gives it a distinctive tension, at once fragile and monumental, ephemeral and enduring.
Her imagery is equally charged. Instead of presenting isolated emblems, Li creates a mythic vocabulary that recurs across bodies as if drawn from an ongoing dream world. Fairies rendered with elongated limbs and flowing garments hover between sensuality and guardianship, less like fantasy creatures than psychic protectors. Floral vessels rooted at the sternum or spine bloom outward, transforming the body into a living container of orchids, lilies, and imaginary blossoms. Serpents weave through these compositions—sometimes braided into hair or wings, sometimes curling around limbs—evoking transformation, danger, and wisdom while carrying echoes of both East Asian and Western mythologies. By interlacing these motifs, Li offers not a repertoire of images but a cosmology: each tattoo becomes an emissary from her inner fairyland called forth into visibility through the skin of her clients.
Compositional movement deepens this sense of narrative. Rather than anchoring an image at the center of a limb or back, Li’s designs drift, wrap, and extend, turning the client’s body into a living scroll. A serpent might begin at the shoulder and vanish into the waistline; a floral arabesque may root at the sternum and burst outward across the chest and arm. Even in symmetrical works—sternal or spinal tattoos radiating outward like reliquaries or mandalas—there is always a subtle rupture: a tendril escaping, a curve breaking free. This interplay of order and freedom reflects her philosophy of “structure tempered by dream” and infuses the work with temporality, as if each tattoo were an unfolding narrative rather than a static picture.
What distinguishes Li’s practice even further is its psychological charge. Her tattoos seem less applied than revealed, as if each figure or form had been waiting within the client’s skin all along. In her artist statement she writes that “our inner world is as vast as the universe itself,” and her work makes that belief visible. Many clients leave her studio not simply decorated but accompanied by a psychological companion—a fairy, a floral apparition, a mythic beast—that appears to have emerged from their own unconscious. In this way, Li treats tattooing as more than craft; it is a metaphysical practice, a rebellion against materialist values and a reminder that our inner lives are alive and in need of embodiment.
Parallel to her tattoo practice, Li continues to draw and paint on cold-pressed paper, often in graphite or watercolor. These works explore the same vocabulary of fairies, serpents, and blossoms but with a temporal logic different from tattooing’s immediacy. On paper she can expand the imagery outward, sometimes with brilliant color, sometimes in monochrome detail, rehearsing and enlarging the visions that will later find a home on skin. This cross-media practice shows that her visions are not flashes of inspiration but a sustained artistic language. When viewed together, her tattoos and works on paper form a dual practice: paper as rehearsal and expansion, skin as embodiment and communion. This dialogue between media underscores her rare ability to make intimate art that is simultaneously rigorous and visionary.
In a field where stylistic schools often function like enclaves, Li’s achievement is to chart a new aesthetic without relying on shock or novelty. Her work feels closer to visionary art, psychoanalytic illustration, or even liturgical ornament than to conventional tattoo practice. Yet it remains unmistakably her own, distinguished by a draughtsman’s precision, a storyteller’s imagination, and a philosopher’s inward gaze. By merging tattooing and fine art, Ling is eel positions the body not as mere surface but as portal, inviting viewers and wearers alike to consider what worlds might surface if we trusted our dreams and archetypes—a reminder that the art of tattooing can be as intellectually and spiritually resonant as any other contemporary medium. Her fairyland, inscribed on both skin and paper, asks us to look inward—and to discover the universes waiting there.
