Hi — I'm Aleksandrs Roze. In tattooing, most people know me as Alex Roze. I was born in Riga, Latvia, I'm 34, and I've been tattooing for the past 16 years. If you're reading this, you're probably deciding whether to trust me with your skin — so let me tell you honestly where I come from.
Before tattoos, there was design. I was 16 when an agency recruited me as a graphic designer, and that was my first real lesson in what quality and responsibility to a client actually mean. It's also why traditional tattooing was my first love — I was fascinated by how something complex can be compressed into a few simple shapes, less information, yet the meaning stays whole. Neo-traditional came later, when I saw its threads back to Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Japanese tattooing. I've been pulling on those threads ever since.
London made me the artist I am. Eight years at Hammersmith Tattoo, 2011 to 2019 — multiple styles, thousands of clients, and every layer of how a studio really runs. From there I went deeper into black & grey realism, micro-realism, and fine line: same design principles, now with a serious study of how light and shadow are built in an image. In 2021 I opened my own studio, Princelet Tattoo in Shoreditch, and honestly — the guest artists who came through those doors taught me as much as I taught anyone.
Canada found me before I found it. During the pandemic I was tattooing in Riga, and my black & grey work caught on with Canadian soldiers stationed at the NATO base in Ādaži. I liked them; apparently they liked me too, because word travelled. In late 2024, Rocky Mountain Tattoo invited me to Kelowna, and since May 2025 this is home. The other half of my life is AI engineering — I build the agent systems that run this studio, so that when we meet at the chair, all of me is there for your tattoo. That part matters to me more than anything on this page.
When I'm not at the studio, I'm with my wife and our three cats — and the rest of the day goes into the subjects I've been quietly obsessed with for years: architectures of large language models, information theory and entropy, recursion, linguistics and language in computation, agentic AI, and readings in determinism.
Out of that obsession I founded MotherlabsAI — a personal project where I experiment with how natural language can drive token-unbounded, intent-driven development cycles, and how agentic coding harnesses like Codex and Claude Code can be used as runtime layers for better performance and output, without touching model weights. The documentation lives in my research section.
I'm also deeply curious about human cognition and reinforcement learning — how entropy reduction works in the brain and in the inner voice, how recursive exploration helps us reach goals, and structural realism as a way of seeing it all. I don't claim expertise in any of this. My poetic feeling has carried my intuition further than credentials would — so I stay open, and let understanding converge over time.