For Tom McMillan, owner of Auckland’s Sunset Tattoo, beauty is like all of life’s best things – handmade.

I actually don’t worry about my own identity at all any more. As a young child, I worried about who I was and what was happening around me. Like most teenagers and young adults, I concerned myself with how I looked, acted, spoke, and so on, to try to fit in or stand out when I needed to impress people. These worries are gone now.

I don’t care at all what people think or how I look. It’s the best feeling! I love seeing how others choose to express themselves, and see a great deal of beautiful people using the stories they have created about themselves to present themselves in certain ways, and I love that too, it’s just not for me.

As I don’t have a real deep connection to any one culture, group, or country, the idea of ​​who I “am” is not a story I need to create. I tend now to just observe what and who I am and try to look at it from an objective point of view. This can be really useful because it leads you to become completely ok with yourself, and this means you can start exploring new things, and have a lot less social and personal anxiety. I’m totally fine being an outsider.

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I think my family, to an extent, gave me certain tastes and ideals for sure. There has always been a tonne of art, music, food, architecture, and conversation about ideas in my life. The idea that art, both making it and enjoying it, is an important part of life comes from my immediate family.

Thinking back I don’t think there was a lot of emphasis on fashion. It was the real content of the art or thing that was important. I think we are a fairly rebellious bunch too, so I definitely see beauty in defiance, struggles against power and greed, and the stories of outsiders, rebels, and the underdog.

But as they were maybe a lot more academic and classical in their tastes than me, I think I challenged my family though when I started tattooing. I started in the early 2000s and at the time the NZ tattoo scene was pretty underground, and there wasn’t ‘t a lot of knowledge about the art form in the community. I think I scared the s..t out of my mother when I told her I was starting a tattoo apprenticeship. It’s funny, no matter how liberal or open-minded people from the boomer generation and further back could be, that acceptance still hasn’t run through to tattooing.

While the rest of the world has long moved on from questions about the artistic legitimacy of tattooing, and the nature of the people wearing tattoos, the older generation are still stuck on this idea of ​​tattoos being for sailors and criminals. It’s interesting because the bias and prejudice still held in some parts of the community against tattoos is actually stopping them from seeing any beauty in tattoos at all. They literally can’t even look at the art properly, because they are so hung up on their own intolerance of the very existence of the medium.

One thing I feel really strongly about is that there is beauty in the handmade. There is beauty in the life of an 85-year-old wooden toy maker sitting in a workshop in Japan, mastering his trade and not budging on his process. Keeping a tradition going, and adding his own creative flair. He makes the thing, we enjoy it. No computers, no sexy advertising, just a dedicated human being, making something to share. This is something we are losing, and worth keeping.

The best things in life – well-made food, good music, art and so on – are made with our hands. We pass the knowledge on. This human process is beautiful and unique. I’m trying to conform to this ideal. Make the thing, struggle, give it away. See something someone else has made, appreciate it, study it, learn from it.

When I see a master tattooer’s work in person, which is very rare, I’m still genuinely moved by it and it will have all been done by hand. You can see what they were thinking, the way their hands moved, the energy in the drawing. It’s hard to truly convey how hard my trade is to get good at, and how rare it is to see a truly masterful work. I feel lucky to understand this, and really “get it” when I see something special.

With tattooing I think the most beautiful of all is how Māori and Pasifika people have created a renaissance in the use of the art form to enhance a sense of pride and belonging in their culture. I think the moko kauae for example is probably the most beautiful thing in all of tattooing. Not only aesthetically but because it holds so much meaning to the wearer. It connects them to the past and to their place in their present communities while also being an act of defiance.

I still feel shocked when I read in the media about women being judged or oppressed by Pākehā because they wear moko kauae. It says so much more about the person doing the judging than the person wearing the tattoo. I see beauty in the defiance, the strength and the pride people have in their tattoos. Whether it’s a Samoan pe’a, a moko, or a puhoro.

I have four children and I kind of want them to learn how to think for themselves, ask questions, and be able to make sense of the world around them. Hopefully they get the tools to make their own minds up about what they value and see beauty in. I think self-worth and confidence is probably key.

I have two young girls, aged four and seven, and a teenage girl too. And honestly we just make sure they are learning, asking questions, and having fun all the time. It’s not hard to give your kids a sense of self-worth and to understand that they are beautiful no matter what when they are young, but really it’s the outside world that will start to make them question those things.

It gets much, much harder once they are in their teens, when they get a phone and start to view their image as an incredibly important part of their identity. The hope is that you can get them confident enough that it doesn’t take over .