Tattoos, textiles, and digital art share more in common than you might think. But without creatives like Brooklyn-based artist Gossamer Rozen, the world might not stop to consider how some of humanity’s most ancient art practices weave together with the digital age.

Rozen, who uses she/they pronouns interchangeably, is a self-taught hand poke tattooist and founder of Tigerbob, a bespoke luxury fashion and merch brand that operates from its flagship studio in New York’s bustling Industry City. Launched in May 2022 alongside the Tigerbob Genesis NFT collection, the brand centers on Rozen's hand-drawn and pixelated tiger head designs. 

Tigerbob grew from Rozen’s deep connection with the tiger motif and their long-time practice of textile-making. The tiger avatar was inspired by Rozen’s personal love of cats and influenced by the styles popularized by Korean Minhwa folk art, traditional tattoo methods, and Japanese and Chinese textiles. 

As a practiced textile artist, Rozen has always translated their hand-drawn designs into digital form by the use of a grid technique. The process makes artwork adaptable for digital reproductions of all sizes and even clothing, like the styles seen in Tigerbob’s latest cashmere loungewear collection. 

This grid method also mirrors the meticulous technique Rozen uses in hand poke tattoos, where every ink dot is individually placed on the skin. Seeing this connection between pixels, ink, and stitches, Rozen freely translates designs between the digital, flesh, and fabric. It was this combination of art practices that eventually sparked Rozen’s interest in NFTs and inspired them to translate their affinity for pixel designs to crypto art.

In September 2024, Rozen will release Elysian Garden, a limited-edition NFT drop on OpenSea. The collection features 216 handmade digital playing cards in four distinct colorways that appeal to different types of collectors. “I wanted to start with the playing cards because it's a format that all of us are familiar with,” Rozen recently told us. 

Elysian Garden taps into the nostalgia of classic desktop card games like Solitaire that many ‘90s kids played on their old Windows computers. By reimagining something so universally familiar, Rozen invites collectors to experience a playful connection to their genre-defining artistic expression.

In the interview ahead, Rozen explains their creative process, the inspiration for Elysian Garden, and how their work weaves digital art with traditional craftsmanship.

‍Note: This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

OpenSea: It’s fascinating to hear how your personal identity and artistic influences have shaped the Tigerbob brand. Can you tell us more about how the Elysian Garden project builds on those themes and what your inspiration was?

Gossamer Rozen: “Elysian” is actually my middle name, and this project is an expansion of the Tigerbob brand. The tiger motif reflects my love for my three cats — I’m a huge cat person — but I didn’t start drawing tigers until I began creating tattoo designs. The tiger eventually became an illustrative piece that represents me, almost like my avatar in this digital world. I've used this tiger image as my profile picture (PFP) for all my tattoo work for a long time.

Eventually, I also wanted to create a brand focused on art objects that also connects to slow fashion and merchandise that's not disposable. I wanted to oppose fast fashion and production. I've always been interested in this mission, but it's challenging to be ethical in production while also creating something meaningful and durable. I'm always balancing the creation of functional items that are primarily art objects, which is how the idea for the digital Elysian Garden playing cards, the dimensions and technical designs of which are based on my knitting processes, came about. 

OpenSea: Tell me a bit about your process. How does a piece of art go from being a hand-poked tattoo to something like an NFT? Are you using generative art in that process at all?

Gossamer Rozen: I'm not using generative art. All of the Tigerbob PFPs, I built myself. I made traits as if they could be generated, but I actually made a spreadsheet and put them together according to some randomness, but also according to aesthetics. So, I put all 1,000 together by hand. It was a lot of work. Similarly, the Elysian Garden project is 216 pieces, and every single piece is handmade. I designed all 52 cards and created four different colorways for them. The 52 cards also include a card back and a Joker card, which people will see in the reveal. I'm excited for people to see it after the reveal.

But yeah, I appreciate generative art. It’s something I’ve done. I worked on another project with some folks in early 2021, and it was fun to learn this kind of hands-on approach to creating a group project with other folks. It was really fun to work on different artwork and traits for that. But it wasn’t my own, so I definitely knew I wanted to do something that incorporated my other mediums that I like, which are textiles and tattoos, and mix it with digital art.

OpenSea: What initially drew you into the decision to start making NFTs?

Gossamer Rozen: The first thing that really pulled my interest in NFTs were all these pixel art PFPs. At first, I felt like they were very simple and minimalistic, which in itself is interesting as a digital art piece. As I started looking more into pixel art and finding my own relationship to it through retro video games and things like Pokémon, I saw that there were also these relationships to textile work, like a knitting chart or a weaving chart, which is all a grid. All of those types of charts are very mathematical in producing textile work. So, there was already this connection to antique computing that I found interesting in these pixel charts that I could build with my tiger motif.

That’s why Tigerbob is a pixel art project — why I translated my hand-drawn image to pixel art. I found that I could scale up and down the image without distortion because it’s done in a grid format. When I’m creating my apparel and other designs on my various programming knitting machines, I can scale up and down that design and use it in different formats without distorting the image. That’s why the pixel art was so important — to get every pixel exactly right for this tiger’s face.

When I made that connection, I realized that the iconography could be recognizable in many different mediums of context, whether it’s painted, printed, part of a textile piece, wearable, or an object. That’s why you’ll see I also have this three-dimensional version of Tiger Bob that is based on the hand-drawn design. This plush toy.

OpenSea: Yeah, let’s see it!

Gossamer Rozen: Here, we have Tigerbob as the pixel tiger that’s knitted. The construction of the pixels is all knitted in, not printed, and that really rings true to being very medium-specific with the work. I have a strong history of creating three-dimensional work — I studied sculpture and making soft sculptural objects that can be art pieces themselves. You can see on the back of this plush Tigerbob there's a special tag and everything; it’s a very limited edition item. So, I’m creating these art objects that are wearable or physical in some way, bringing in this digital presence they have as pixels and that scalability. I’m thinking about all these concepts together, and it’s important to me to have them together. That’s why, at my studio, I have my knitting machines, my tattoo materials, and the showroom for all the products. 

OpenSea: What about having all three concepts together is so meaningful, do you think?

Gossamer Rozen: Seeing it all together brings a sense of material honesty and integrity, being thoughtful about why this design is a tiger, why it’s pixelated, and how it exists in different formats. It links all these different mediums that are working together. Each is an individual product or market fit for different audiences. But they can be united in a way where, even if you don’t like tattoos or won’t buy a sweater, you can still see how they’re connected. That’s a big piece of the work I do — bringing together the construction of these physical objects with the construction of the raster image [the pixel-based image, also known as a “bitmap”]  that reads each line of the SVG [a type of vector graphic file-type for digital artwork] to make each image.  I am comparing how a raster image is read by a computer — line by line — to how a knitted piece is constructed — one row of stitches at a time. I find it really fascinating, and that’s what Tigerbob is about.

OpenSea: This is where I begin to wonder about the practice of stick and poke tattoos. How similar is the process of hand poke tattooing, where you’re really getting down there at a more granular level, to this process of creating art at the pixel level?

Gossamer Rozen: To me, it all comes down to making things by hand. I feel like it’s a special skill to be able to do it well. And that’s something that I have found my own niche for as a product as well. 

I specifically do hand poke because it’s more in line with the historical way that tattoos were made, which was more ritualistic and more tribal. It had a lot more to do with coming of age and different moments in one’s life. Some of the pieces I have on my forehead and over here are machine-done, but they’re really inspired by North African tattoos of Morocco, and these are Filipino designs. That is my heritage — Filipino and African American. I tried to research as much as I could early in 2017 what those different cultures would look like. I will never be able to pinpoint exactly where my family came from in Africa, but I found these tattoos very beautiful, and I really wanted to wear something that came from the African continent.

I wanted to be able to share this relationship to tattooing that really speaks to the old way that it used to be done. Still keeping some aspects of that alive is something I want to preserve. This type of mark-making is similar to textiles because as you’re doing each stitch, you’re doing a similar motion. A lot of textile work is repetitive motions.

OpenSea: I grew up doing embroidery. It sort of reminds me of that.

Gossamer Rozen: Yeah, I did a lot of hand sewing. A lot of my pieces, even my plush pieces, were all hand-sewn. All the details were embroidered with patchwork and things like that. I don’t have one with me, but on my website, you can see some of these beautiful fish that I’ve made. But yeah, so that kind of mark-making, being in control of every single small slow stitch and every little bit of depositing ink, that process is important to me. I consider myself a process artist because all of the different mediums I work with are united. The processes are what drive my affinity to creating that finished piece. The finished piece is important, but the process needs to be something that I find meditative and fulfilling in order for me to work in that medium. So that’s why it seems weird that there are tattoos and textiles, but for me, they are very close.

OpenSea: Yeah, absolutely. I can see the connection now because of the way you speak about it. They’re process-oriented, and they’re meditative. They are also all grids, which translates to both physical and digital.

Gossamer Rozen: Yeah, and what’s so beautiful about these types of works that are abstracted in the sense of each brush stroke or each stitch or each poke being its own individual unit of this larger piece, is that it’s directly related to how I draw with pixels on my computer and how I am translating a design. I’m creating these hand-drawn curves, round shapes, and different ornaments and simplifying it as much as I can so that it can still be read very small and very large.

If you look at a lot of historical textiles — I’ve been a textile collector for over 10 years, and I have a collection of pieces from all over the world — being able to see how these geometric and abstracted pieces became cultural objects and signifiers of certain real physical things. Like, maybe this is an animal, or these are people in a village together. I have this beautiful rug from Morocco that’s completely bare. Instead of having a lot of ornamentation all over, it has this one particular medallion in the middle that looks like there’s a village of people, and then it’s surrounded by sand or water all around. It’s interesting how you can get this sense of community from something so abstract and simple. I feel like there are certain ways to develop that kind of mark-making and visual language filled with symbolism in these tiny things that we’re trying to make legible. When you think about retro gaming, the only reason things were so small and had so few colors is because that was the limitation of the computing. But there’s something so beautiful about those limitations, about only being able to knit with two colors, only being able to weave with five colors. The early developments of the Jacquard loom, which is very early computing, used a punch card. I’m thinking about all those different things when I’m designing these pixel pieces.

OpenSea: That is truly fascinating. Now, tell us about your decision to create digital playing cards as part of the Elysian Garden drop. Why playing cards?

Gossamer Rozen: I started Tigerbob Genesis with just the tiger head and some small objects that were around its head or it was holding. Now I’m starting to expand the visual language of the pixelated Tigerbob with these larger pieces, which I developed based on a set of standard 52 playing cards. I’ve always wanted to make something more akin to a tarot deck (which is next). But I wanted to start with the playing cards because it’s a format that all of us are familiar with. We recognize the card symbols and the ranks of the cards. Interpreting those in an artistic way that’s still playable if I were to print the cards, which I would love to. I would also love to make a desktop version of the game. There are many different things I’d like to do with that. 

OpenSea: People could play Solitaire, maybe FreeCell.

Gossamer Rozen: I always played that on my Windows 95 when I was younger.

OpenSea: Me too! Speaking of the cards, what do the four colorways represent?

Gossamer Rozen: One set of colors are based on the Tigerbob apparel collection for 2025. I always select the colors about six months to a year ahead of time because I order my own yarn, and I source it all myself. I work with the yarn on my own machines and with the factory I work with, which is also in Brooklyn. So everything’s made in Brooklyn. I always do all the planning early, so I wanted to explore the palette I had chosen actively with an art project. Now I feel like I have an even stronger understanding of those colors that I’m going to be using for next year’s collection because I’ve made this piece. The next three colorways — there’s one colorway that is based on the five colors you typically see on playing cards, then there’s the RGB collection, which is kind of based on one of the palettes I had used in the Tigerbob Genesis project called Laser, where the tiger was outlined in red ink. The last palate is called the Vintage palette. 

OpenSea: So what can people expect when they’re ready to mint? What will the minting experience be like?

Gossamer Rozen: Sure, so this is going to be a standard mint. There are 216 tokens, 20 of which will be held back by the Tigerbob wallet. I’m holding back tokens instead of taking royalties, so this project is zero royalties. The allowlisted projects will be, first and foremost, holders of Tigerbob Genesis, who will get a discount price and also get first access to being able to mint. The rest of the other tokens that are also in my ecosystem will also get a chance to mint early. Then I will be allowlisting some friendly projects that are adjacent to Tigerbob, supporting Tigerbob, like the Nouns project, Proof, and a few others for sure. There are definitely a couple of communities of folks who I’ve been quietly communicating with and who understand my work, and I really find affinity with them. I’m always grateful for that and want to extend the allow list to as many different groups as possible where I could find some relationship with the creators and the folks in the community.

OpenSea: Fantastic! Well, Gossamer, this has been a super insightful conversation, definitely the highlight of my day. Thank you so much.

Gossamer Rozen: Yeah, thank you. I’ve been looking forward to being able to express all this for a long time.