Surrealist artist and Academy Award-winning art director H.R. Giger, known primarily for his work designing the sinister ‘bio-forms’ that inhabited Ridley Scott’s genre-defining Alien series, sadly passed away yesterday. Created as an extension of his work Necronom IV, the conception of the father of gothic sci-fi marked a departure from the Roswell-inspired ‘little green men’ that had previously inhabited the collective imagination, offering up a much more menacing possibility. It is however his depiction of the body that marks the artist as a visionary, warping and subverting the figure and mechanism of the human form.

Below is an extract from a 1995 International Tattoo Art magazine interview with Giger on the occasional of the New Jersey tattoo convention where the artist saw a translation of his biological vision into the formation of tattoos: