CARY JOJI FUKUNAGA AND TATTOO ARTIST JOSH LORD

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It is not often that an artist speaks with pride of the many copies his work has inspired. But if you ask Josh Lord—the tattooist behind the (fake) tattoos in Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s Sisters, the series Blindspot on NBC, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, and, most memorably, the first season of HBO’s True Detective—imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery. “I have actually done a few versions of the Rust tattoo on people in real life,” he says to Cary Joji Fukunaga, who directed that series’s first season, of the crow that notably covers the forearm of Matthew McConaughey in True Detective. “A lot of people have asked from all over the world if they can get copies of it because they want to get tattooed. So you inspired a whole generation of that same tattoo on people.” To which a visibly amused Fukunaga laughs, “I don’t even know what to say.”

If Lord and Fukunaga, whose professional collaboration on True Detective had an unusual depth, banter back and forth like close friends, it’s because they are. After first meeting through a mutual friend over dinner, the two quickly took a liking to each other and, when Fukunaga signed on to direct the entire first season of Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective, he brought Lord on board to help ensure the tattoos had the same sort of detailed realism that runs through the series. “Prior to the show, I had done tattoo work on my first film,” says Fukunaga of 2009’s Sin Nombre, “so I knew how hard it was to get authentic or convincingly real tattoos for a TV show, and, most often, I feel films and TV shows just fail at tattoos.”

In True Detective, the tattoos graduated from decoration to characterization, especially in the case of McConaughey’s Rustin Cohle, a diffcult but brilliant detective who sets out to capture a serial killer with the help of Woody Harrelson’s Martin Hart. Pizzolatto’s original script called for a pair of flaming dice, but Lord says that he and Fukunaga quickly decided it wasn’t right for his character. They decided instead to turn to Cohle’s undercover past as a member of a biker gang, whose emblem was originally meant to be a crow. Later revisions turned the gang into the Iron Crusaders (its members’ tattoos reference anvils, bones, engine parts, and demons), but Rustin’s iconic bird remained. “When we came to try and figure out the Rust Cohle character, we started infusing details about his tattoos with clues into his life prior to the show,” Fukunaga explains.

Lord, who also practices at the East Side Ink tattoo shop in Manhattan’s Alphabet City, says that, in keeping with the detailed attention to realism that made True Detective so compelling, he was careful to make sure that all the tattoos were appropriate for the show’s Nineties setting, which proved relatively easy given his own experience tattooing bikers during those years. On the other hand, for Reggie Ledoux, a pedophile with a torso covered in tattoos, Lord says that he had to delve into the iconography of the neo-Nazi movement. “I heavily researched all of the neo-Nazi tattoos, and everything that we pitched was something authentic,” he recalls. “It was pretty creepy. I lost a lot of sleep over all that research.”

One of Reggie’s tattoos in particular, that of a wavy- haired boy with his hands clasped in prayer, provoked much speculation on the internet given its resemblance to Rust. Lord says that the similarity was intentional: “I tried to make the tattoo of the child praying looking like it might be Rust,” he confirms. “I was just drawing a visual red herring in there. They didn’t ask me to do that. I was just drawing it to cause some more mystery.”

As befits a tattooist, Lord has several tattoos himself, but Fukunaga says he only has a few minor ones. “That still counts,” Lord says when Fukunaga gestures at a small mark between his fingers.

“I’m not heavily inked,” Fukunaga insists.

“Yet,” Lord laughs.