And then I dropped my phone into a toilet puddle in downtown Sao Paulo…..
The crowd from the bar above Choque Cultural has spilled out onto the roof and I've spilled out with them, hoping to escape the thick mugginess inside, not to mention the awkwardness of not being able to understand that evening’s entertainment. Bit stupid going to a Portuguese beatnik-style poetry event when you don’t understand Portuguese. At one point the entertainment took a rather ‘unique’ change in direction but more about that later…

I’m there to talk to Baixo and Mariana, the couple who own the Choque Cultural art gallery. We're talking about a collaboration planned for December, a gathering of their friends, who happen to include some of the best tattoo artists in Sao Paulo. Baixo and Mariana know this world better than anyone. In addition to running one of Sao Paulo's more influential art galleries, they ran a Sao Paulo tattoo studio in the late 90s and have a son who is a tattoo artist at the Black Ball shop in Pinheiros.