BLOK TATTOO STUDIO

BLOK is a tattoo studio located in an industrial warehouse in the San Roc area of Badalona, Barcelona. Conceived as an open and flexible 80 m² plan, it can adapt to accommodate between one and four artists working simultaneously.

Designed by XAARCHIVE Studio, the project explores the notions of sterility, precision, and the body. Drawing from hospital and industrial references, BLOK proposes a radically clean and functional aesthetic, reinterpreting the codes of medicine, laboratories, and technical architecture through a contemporary lens.

Natural light, concrete, stainless steel, and semi-transparent PVC curtains define a spatial landscape that oscillates between the surgical and the poetic. The ceiling was stripped to expose its raw structure, while linear LED lighting emphasizes the geometry of the space, amplifying its refined and clinical character.

More than a studio, BLOK represents a hybrid typology that redefines how spaces of care, modification, and bodily expression inhabit the contemporary city.

“The Anti-Hospital: Rethinking Sterile Spaces”

BLOK subverts the notion of the sterile space. While medical environments seek to neutralize the body, this project celebrates it. The studio borrows the material and lighting language of hospitals, including steel, white, transparency, and order, but reinterprets it through an industrial and emotional lens.

The result is an environment where precision does not imply coldness, and where visual clarity enhances creativity. BLOK transforms the idea of sterility into an aesthetic experience that celebrates technology, craftsmanship, and bodily transformation as a contemporary ritual.

Located in the industrial area of San Roc, a neighborhood of monoblock housing, workshops, and warehouses that still retains the rawness of its industrial past, BLOK is embedded within an urban fabric where everyday life and production coexist without filters. The project embraces this hybrid condition to redefine how a tattoo studio can inhabit the contemporary city, positioned between the technical and the expressive, the local and the global.

More than a commercial space, BLOK functions as a cultural platform and meeting point within the underground tattoo scene in Barcelona and worldwide. Since its opening, the studio has aimed to host international artists who find here a shared and experimental workspace where architecture amplifies both precision and ritual.