The Family Business is the first exhibition to be held at Heartbreak, a new gallery in Marylebone. It features over thirty portraits by Fredi Marcarini featured in, and to coincide with the launch of a new book from Pavilion – Tattooed by The Family Business – a coffee table visual feast about the Verona-born, now London-based tattooist Mo Coppoletta, his tattoo parlour in Exmouth Market, his team of tattoo artists and the people they put their ink in. Dazed Digital caught up with Mo to talk about the pictures, the art of tattooing and The Family Business.

Dazed Digital: What's behind the picture of you on the stairwell menacingly wielding a stencil for a whole body piece and looking like the scariest, yet most stylish butcher in town?
Mo Coppoletta: The word stylish is good. It was Fredi's idea. He's got great visions about pictures. The apron and style is a wink to a retro feel. That cross between a butcher, that big stencil I've got in my hand almost looks like a piece of skin I ripped off someone. It sums up a lot of things we like [at The Family Business]: gothic Victorian, magic, hocus pocus and Sweeney Todd.

DD: The Family Business is based on Exmouth Market, in the heart of one of London's first little Italy's dating back to the 1850s - surely no coincidence for a man from Verona?
Mo Coppoletta: I don't think there are many streets like it in Central London. It feels like we belong. For us running an independent tattoo shop surrounded by independent jewelers and restaurants, it makes sense. We wouldn't feel good if we were on a normal high street with HMV. You would lose a lot of identity and soul.

DD: You've managed to create a boutique feel, but buying tattoos is not like buying shoes.
Mo Coppoletta: Some people come back after a couple of years. Some are collectors. So they like to collect a bit from you and bit from another artist. Generally, for first timers who start at The Family Business - they rarely leave. They are glad when they come back and have some more tattoos in my shop. It still keeps the charm of a craft shop; of work you do with your hands.

DD: It's a big decision getting a tattoo. I remember the nervous energy I had when I first came to The Family Business to be tattooed.
Mo Coppoletta: There's always a point where as much as you think you're in control of yourself and your life you need to surrender to the tattooist. There's a point where even though you thought that you decided everything about that tattoo, but then it's up to him to do it. If you find the right point of surrender it's a great experience. If you think you can dictate how it's going to be done it's going to be awful.

DD: You once described tattooing as not working.
Mo Coppoletta: When you're drained from managing the shop and other projects tattooing is my little hole. I can hide in there for three hours. So it's not work. It's therapeutic.

DD: And your clients?
Mo Coppoletta: When they feel the pain, and they sit there, they think you're their therapist and tell you things ... well some do and some don't – but tattooing is an intimate thing.

Tattooed by The Family Business is out now by Pavillion Books. The exhibition THE FAMILY BUSINESS by Fredi Marcarini run from September 16-26 2010 at Heartbreak,17 Bulstrode Street, London W1U 2JH

Text by Stuart Wright