Seventeen years under the needle. Still to this day.
I’m Benny Aquilina — Benny Aquatatts to anyone who knows me. I got my first tattoo at eighteen and it never stopped there. Seventeen years of collecting work, from one of Sydney’s best all the way international.
Obsessed with the craft.
What started as a single piece became an obsession with the artwork, the artists and the culture around it. Seventeen years later I’m living it every day — running a premier tattoo studio in the heart of the Gold Coast, around the machines and the clients from the first line of every piece to the last.
This isn’t a brand built at a distance. It’s a brand built at the counter of a working studio.
Learned the hard way.
A lot has changed in seventeen years, and the biggest shift is knowledge — how skin should be prepared before it’s worked on, and how tattoos should be looked after once they’re done. When I started collecting, nobody handed you that knowledge.
I learned it the hard way, on my own skin. The collection started in Sydney’s chairs under Ollie — one of Sydney’s best, who has tattooed almost my entire body and still counts me as his most heavily tattooed client. Seventeen years on, that work has held to a standard most wouldn’t. From there it went as far as Bali. My entire back was removed by laser and reworked over three days straight, two artists in the room. My chest was rebuilt over five full-day sessions, new work over old. Sit through work like that and you understand something most people never will — the weeks, months and years after the needle decide what your artwork becomes.
A front-row seat.
My clients get what I never had. Every day at the studio I pass it on: how to prep and hydrate your skin in the lead-up to a session, and how to look after the work once it’s yours — not just for the first few weeks, but for the months and years that follow.
I see everything from start to finish. Fresh pieces walking out the door, settled pieces walking back in. There is no better education in what keeps ink looking sharp.
This is the standard.
You spend thousands of dollars on detailed artwork, carried out by serious artists, to wear for life. It deserves better than an afterthought off a chemist shelf.
Keeping that work looking as elite as the day you walked out of the studio is the whole point. Looking after the art isn’t a slogan. It’s the job.
Why I made it.
I didn’t set out to start a brand. I set out to stop handing my clients something I wouldn’t put on my own skin.
TEL is new. The work behind it isn’t. Years of refining it around the craft. Formulated in Australia, proven in a working studio, manufactured to our specification by our production partner — and tested where it counts: on people I see again three weeks later, and on my own back and chest. Nothing ships unless it earns its place.
Still in the chair.
Seventeen years on, I’m still in the chair. These days it’s Valerio Ciciarelli — an international artist, local at my own studio. From one of Sydney’s best, all the way international, to work that now happens under my own roof.
The collection never stopped. Neither did the standard. Read Valerio’s write-up →
Look after the art.