Claudio Traina

Venice, a club diary and an apprenticeship he paid for

Traina grew up in Venice and arrived at music before he arrived at tattooing. Before he owned a machine he was putting on events for a club in his home town, which is where the habit of thinking about a room — who plays, when, and what follows what — was learnt. His own account of Italy at the time is that an alternative life was hard to sustain and the trade he wanted was effectively sealed shut: he has said that getting into the Italian tattoo scene a decade ago felt like breaking into Azkaban. No studio took him on terms he could live with, so he paid for the apprenticeship himself. He describes himself as having always been an outsider with a lot of passion and work ethic, and that is the version of the story he tells in interviews rather than any tale of being discovered.

He dates his own custom tattoo work to 2012, and worked between Italy and England, travelling for conventions, before London became the base. The drawing went from fine line and minimalist pieces into micro-realism, geometric work and blackwork. The music never became a hobby on the side; by his own framing the two careers are the same career, with the studio supplying the bands and the bands supplying the booth.

28 Denmark Street, where the studio doubles as a venue

Sixty Ink occupies 28 Denmark Street, London WC2H 8NJ — Tin Pan Alley, the short street that housed the music publishers, then the guitar shops, and now a row of small venues. Traina founded it and runs it with his partner Rosie. The fit-out was built to be looked at as much as sat in: red walls, bronze resin floors and hand-painted ceiling murals, which is an unusual amount of staging for a tattoo shop and makes more sense once the place is understood as a room that hosts things.

It has hosted them from early on. The studio's first birthday was marked on Saturday 17 December 2022 at the Underworld in Camden, doors at 6pm and curfew at 10pm: live sets from Kid Brunswick and Cotton Eye, a Denmark Street jam session, burlesque, a sideshow billed as Bloody Bones, and Miss Sibyl Vane with her bed of nails. It was 18+, with a spinning wheel, giveaways and free-tattoo coupons as prizes. The night then moved downstairs rather than ending — an after-party from 11pm to 3am at Camden Rocks Club in the same building, with Traina and Clarissa Holly on the decks and £5 entry for anyone who had been to the earlier show.

The studio's commercial side has run in parallel through collaborations and pop-ups with brands including Tinder, Call of Duty and Activision, White Fox and Joe & The Juice, alongside work for musicians. That is what keeps Sixty Ink described as a music-driven studio rather than a shop that happens to like rock records, and it is why the shop itself now appears on festival maps as a participating venue.

The resident: Camden, Leeds, Sunset Strip

The DJ work is the part with a fixed address. Traina is a resident at the Underworld in Camden Town and spends weekends behind the decks for Camden Rocks, and his sound is built around emo, rock, punk and alternative rather than any one scene's narrow canon — rock records, eighties tracks and emo anthems in the same hour.

Outside the residency the slots have been support and festival work. He opened for The All-American Rejects on their most recent tour, and has DJ'd at Slam Dunk Festival, the pop-punk and alternative weekender. The Los Angeles side of the résumé covers the Viper Room, Whisky a Go Go, Hard Rock Cafe and Dirty Mondays, which is a run of rooms with a specific audience: people who want to hear the records they already know played loudly and in a defensible order.

Where he stands now

The most recent dated appearance is the Denmark Street Sessions on Saturday 5 September 2026, a free one-day festival running from 1pm until late along his own street. The bill carried more than twenty live performances spread across Regent Sounds Studios, Thirteen LDN, Wunjo, The Lower Third, Roland, Rough Trade, Dawsons and Sixty Ink, plus artist talks and unannounced guests. The Dash reformed for one night at their original venue; Eaves Wilder played Rough Trade; Henri Herbert played Roland; Pink Juice headlined Thirteen LDN. Traina's own slot was 6pm at Thirteen LDN, 1–3 Denmark Street — the handover point where the daytime live programme became an evening of records, and he held the room through the night.

What is not there is worth stating plainly. There is no discography to weigh up: no albums, no commercially released mixes under his name, and no published reviews of his sets in the music press. The work exists in the rooms and in the listings, and anyone assessing it has to do so from the bookings rather than from recordings. The residency is the through-line, and the support and festival dates attach to it.

What he plays, and the guitar in the back room

Asked to name the artists that matter to him, Traina lists Verdena first, then Queens of the Stone Age, Bring Me The Horizon, My Chemical Romance, Sigur Rós, A Day to Remember, The Beatles, David Bowie, The Mars Volta and Pierce the Veil. It is a useful list because it is not a club-night playlist: Verdena is Italian alternative rock with little UK chart history, Sigur Rós is not danceable in any conventional sense, and the Mars Volta sits a long way from a pop-punk singalong. The sets that come out of that taste tend to move between eras and tempos rather than sitting in one lane for an hour.

He has also kept one foot on the instrument side — he has been customising a Gibson 335 — and his view of the trade is blunt: anyone in it for the money will not last long, because it is a passion-driven career. He is easy to pick out behind the decks or over a client, with a green mullet and beard that have become the shorthand for both businesses.