A Dickade of Dickfish
Paul Tuyen Tran has spent a decade being overshadowed by his own joke. The joke, as it turns out, is one of the most recognisable bodies of work in Australian tattooing.
Day three of the Golden Hand Tattoo Convention (@goldenhandtattooconvention) in Perth. The sky outside is doing something ominous — that specific kind of bruised yellow-grey that comes before a west coast storm rolls in off the Indian Ocean. Inside, it's loud, warm, and smells like Dettol, green soap and ambition.
Paul Tuyen Tran (@dickfishh.tattoos) is on a break. He's just taken runner-up best booth, and he's about to go back to tattooing a quad-phallused artwork of a bear fishing for dickfish by the side of a river on Roger Stuart — @bigbear_tattoo — of Mad Catz Tattoo Perth (@madcatztattoo). This is a normal workday for Paul.
If you're in the Australian and New Zealand tattoo scene, or anywhere the international expo circuit reaches, you know Dickfish. The piscine phallic flair is unmistakable — subtle enough on first glance that it takes a second look, sometimes a third, before it clicks. Then either love or hate. No middle ground. That's by design, even if the design itself started as a joke with a joint and a Judd Apatow film.
The joke has a decade behind it now. A book. Two signature coil machines. A following that extends well beyond the people who'd commission a tattoo of a fish that isn't quite a fish. And behind all of it — an artist whose range runs considerably further than his most famous work would suggest.
The Night the Dickfish Was Born
It's 2016. Paul is in his studio the night before a convention, painting flash, joint in hand, Superbad playing in the background. In the film, a character is drawing dicks. Paul looks at the fish he's been painting. You can probably see where this is going.
"I turned a few of my fish into dicks as a joke," he says. "Never thinking I'd even tattoo one."
He tattoos three of the five at his first expo with them.
The name follows quickly. It's not complicated. "Dicks and fish," he says, with the energy of someone who's answered this question so many times he's long since stopped feeling weird about it. Something in the combination lands — crude subject matter, genuine craft in the execution. People respond to it. Most of them can't tell you exactly why. The Dickfish are funny and they're good. The second part is the part that keeps getting forgotten.
By that point Paul was already four years into his career. Apprenticeship in a heavy walk-in shop in 2012, handling whatever walked through the doors. Spent his first few years chasing black and grey realism because that's what the area needed. He'd done a Bachelor of Visual Arts — originally aiming at animation. He was building something serious. He was chasing awards.
Then he drew some fish with dicks and "kind of just gave up on the awards and everything else."
"This is more fun," he says. "This is why I do it. I enjoy art, creating."
The Artist Behind the Aquatic Phallus
The thing about Paul Tuyen that gets buried — and he knows it, and it clearly stings a little — is how good he is at everything else.
Japanese. Black and grey realism. Freehand across styles most artists wouldn't touch without a stencil. A background in sculpture and painting before tattooing ever entered the picture. His influences for the genital marine work run through Dansin (@dansin), through Shunga (春画) erotic art, through traditional Japanese woodblock prints — which is to say, through some of the most compositionally sophisticated imagery in the history of art. The joke is built on a serious foundation.
"I've done some really crazy accomplishments," he says, "and it gets overshadowed by some dick drawings."
He says it without bitterness. More like someone who made his choice, stands by it, and has been living with the consequences — good and strange — long enough to stop being surprised by either. The Dickfish is a double-edged sword — his words — and he's been holding both edges for a decade now.
His approach to clients reflects something deeper than the surface absurdity. Every tattoo has a purpose. Every client gets treated differently. "It's always storytelling," he says. "Everyone has their own meanings." The Dickfish collectors — and there are serious collectors, people with multiple pieces, whole cock-and-fin narratives building across their skin over years — come to him because the work means something to them, even when what it means is hard to explain to your mum at Christmas.
I have a double Dickfish on my thigh. A cockheaded orca and a dolphin swimming in unison, affectionately named Paul and Anthony — the latter after Anthony Waters (@anthonywaters_tattoo), owner of Mushin Tattoo (@mushintattoo) and the main artist behind my leg sleeve. I haven't shown my mum. I'm not sure how to explain that one. I understand this completely.
When Paul isn't travelling the country for guest spots and expos, he's at Vaiderz HQ (@vaiderz_hq) — a private studio in Mill Park, Victoria — alongside Joey Vaiderz (@joeyvaiderz), founder of Vaiderz Needles and Tattoo Supply (@vaiderzneedles). Paul is a sponsored artist on the Vaiderz proteam alongside Baiden Hindenburg (@baidentattoos), Benjamin Suski (@suskitattoos), Tay Ashby (@mr_deadmind), Dale Walsh (@walshy_tattoos), Sally Lee (@sallyleetattoos), Emily (@misskittykat.tattoo), and George Tattooing (@georgetattooing). He's also supported by Lunar Tattoo Supply (@lunartattoosupply) — the team behind the penis-shaped ink caps you'll spot at his station if you know what you're looking at.
A Dickade, One Book, Two Machines
The book didn't happen because Paul sat down and decided it was time to document a decade of work. He hit the ten-year mark, looked around, realised there was enough history sitting there to fill one, and put it together.
"The history was always there," he says. "I was lazy, and it just happened to work out at ten years."
Fair enough, honestly. A Dickade of Dickfish is the physical record of what a decade of this looks like — someone who's been doing some of the most recognisable work in the country while half the industry forgot he could do anything else. It's the kind of object that earns a second look for the same reason the tattoos do. You pick it up expecting one thing. You get something considerably more considered.
The Mark Sender machines (@marksender) happened in a similar kind of way — less laziness, same sense of things arriving when they're ready rather than being pushed. Two of them: a liner and a shader, both bearing the Dickfish name. I know this because I picked Paul up from Auckland Airport straight off the back of two weeks in a workshop with Mark Sender, hand-building them together before we all headed to the NZ Tattoo and Arts Festival (@nztattoofestival) in New Plymouth, Aotearoa. The machines sold out. Of course they did.
At the booth, someone shows Paul one of them. Paul asks how he finds it. "I don't know," the guy says. "I haven't used it. I just look at it." Paul takes this remarkably well.
"We were just having dinner," Paul says of how the collab with one of the most respected names in coil machine manufacturing came about. "He brought up the idea to build a machine and I thought it was awesome. I've run his machines forever and couldn't think of anyone better."
It took a few years from dinner conversation to finished product. Started as something Paul wanted for himself — a liner and a shader built around exactly how he works, his preferences, his feel for the iron. The fact that other people eventually wanted one was almost an afterthought.
"We just wanted to make a machine for myself, then it got enough traction that other people wanted one, so we made more."
Very Paul, really.
What a Dickade Actually Teaches You
Paul is not a man who reaches for profundity easily. Ask him what a decade of this has taught him and he takes a beat, half-starts a few answers, dismisses them, then lands somewhere genuinely useful.
"Don't take it so seriously. Put your time into your art. Don't worry about all the dumb stuff around it — it's all artificial, all materialistic. End of the day we're artists. We don't need all those bells and whistles."
He thinks on it a bit longer.
"You can polish a turd. It's still a turd."
It's the most Dickfish thing anyone has ever said about tattooing. It's also, quietly, correct.
Paul Tuyen Tran spent four years chasing the awards circuit and then drew some fish with dicks on a convention-eve whim and became one of the most recognisable tattooers in the country. The joke didn't beat the serious work. The serious work was always there — it's just what made the joke land. A dickade on, with a book and two sold-out machines bearing his name, it's getting harder to overlook.
The storm outside breaks as I head back into the expo. Perth gets drenched. Inside, Paul goes back to tattooing the bear.
Various Dickfish works provided by Paul Tuyen Tran aka Dickfish.
Paul Tuyen Tran (@dickfishh.tattoos) works out of Vaiderz HQ, Mill Park, Victoria (@vaiderz_hq). A Dickade of Dickfish is available now via Dickfish Bigcartel or in person at his expo and guest spot appearances. The Dickfish x Mark Sender liner and shader — sold out.
