Tim Smithen, aka Prisonstyle, offers a unique free-hand tattooing style that has customers flying in to experience, writes Joe Bill

“I’m super-lucky because if you said to any other person ‘You’re gonna rock up to your tattooist, you don’t know what you’re getting, but you’re gonna give them a patch of skin and they’re gonna freehand doodle something’, you’d be, like, ‘You’re literally f*cking bonkers’.

“Most people want to plan their tattoo, they want to see drawings, they want to know what the position is - most people want a specific thing. Generally, 99.9% of the time, my clients come to me, I do some doodles and if they like them, we tattoo them in.”
Tim Smithen is infectious. Since moving to Folkestone and opening BRB Tattoo Studio (@prisonstyle_brb) in 2021, his notoriety as a tattooist and an artist has surged. It might be because he is a really enthusiastic chap, or it could be because he is very good at what he does - and he’s very clear on that, too.
“I’m a tattooist, I’m not a tattoo artist,” he says. “Because I believe that tattoo artists are people that create these wonderful pieces.

“So I’m an artist separately. And to be honest, the tattooing came first and the art is now flourishing into something completely different, which is these big doodle murals.”
You might have seen them out on Folkestone’s Harbour Arm and at various places around Kent and beyond, or through the collaborated projects with Docker Brewery, Kana London and Coat Paints. But equally likely, you might have seen his work at BRB Tattoo Studio & Gallery on Tontine Street - a place Tim describes as “a bit of a nutter’s box”.

“I’m absolutely respectful of the tattoo world and everything, but anything I see I will always kind of look at it and think I don’t want to do it like that. “So my studio… it’s anything that’s not associated with a typical tattoo vibe.”
A child of the MSN Messenger generation, BRB, of course, stands for Be Right Back. Tim’s tattooing journey started with, well, himself. Practising on his own body and learning the hand-poked technique, his nickname Prisonstyle was very fitting, although it came from something very different.
“What got me interested was the Russian prison books,” he explains. “There’s a collection of Russian prison tattoo books you can read and they’re wonderfully illustrated. There’s all the meanings of the symbols, and that was quite inspiring because they’re pretty gnarly and they’re pretty rad. And they’re quite naughty, you know? The meanings and everything, they’re pretty dark.

“And then it just spiralled off into me doing my own little doodles that I kind of did on my school sketchbook and they translated somehow over the past five years into people wanting those little doodles that are less dark and horrible and don’t have bad meanings. They’re just fun and wholesome and goofy. But the name still stuck and I never changed it.”
Having learnt the art of tattooing, first in a London studio that had a bit of a “squat vibe” going on and then during an extended period honing his skills in Thailand, Tim returned to the UK to start on his road into professional tattooing.

His unique style, and almost certainly his positive approach, landed him guest spots in iconic West London shop The Blue Tattoo and then the equally-renowned Good Times Tattoo in Shoreditch with artist Nikole Lowe.
“I think that’s when things started to shift gear,” he says. “There were a lot of high-profile people tattooing there and being tattooed there. And I think it kind of created a bit of a buzz. My style and the way I was tattooing was very opposite to anything else going on there. So, you’ve got amazing, wonderful artists who are doing huge ornamental pieces in such fine detail, and then you got me doing kids’ doodles free-hand. It’s bonkers to think about it. So I’m forever thankful to Nikole and to Blue.”
As the Prisonstyle reputation grew, Tim would fly across the world to do guest spots from Thailand to New York, from LA to Berlin.
“Once you start making a name across the pond, you start getting sort of into different groups of people, and interesting people as well, and also like celebrities,” he says. Indeed, Tim can count the likes of Nick Frost, Ella Eyre, Noah Adams and James Gillespie among his clients, while actor Jonny Lee Miller made a journey from New York to Tim’s studio in Folkestone in 2021.
His own move to Folkestone with his family came off the back of a random visit to a friend in the town and a necessity to escape London.

“You know, it was literally beautiful,” he says. “We moved down here two years ago, I got the shop in 2021 and it’s literally been one of the best things that ever happened.”
His move into the art world offers his positive and loving doodles on a larger scale.
“It’s a different vibe to the tattoo world, you know, it’s a little bit more fun… there’s no pressure, you’re not scarring someone, you’re not putting them through pain - unless your art’s awful,” he says. “You’re just putting some art up, you're putting a price tag next to it or not. And people can enjoy it and people can buy it and that’s brilliant.”
With a third child on the way, and the impending arrival of the mobile Steampunk Sauna, Tim is keeping himself busy and there’s nowhere he’s more happy than in his studio.
“I’m so lucky,” he says. “People are always willing to just go for something kind of rad and kind of different. And maybe that’s why people like it, because it’s different. And it’s a bit of a gimmick, you know, it’s always going to be unique because it’s free-handed and it’s not a specific thing. I’m very lucky to be doing it.”

https://www.pstx.co.uk/