A museum in Amsterdam has turned its galleries into a tattoo studio. The Rembrandt House Museum has teamed up with the studios Schiffmacher & Veldhoen in Amsterdam and St. Catherina in Antwerp for a project called The Poor Man's Rembrandt Project, in which tattoo artists are recreating one of Rembrandt's most intricate etchings, The Descent from the Cross from 1633, across a volunteer's entire back. The work is expected to take about 20 hours in total. The volunteer, Bo Kwakernaak, 28, from Amersfoort, answered a call on Instagram to offer his back as the canvas. He already carries a partial version made over roughly ten hours, and the tattoo is due to be finished during a late-night opening at the museum on 7 November.

Members of the public can also take part. Between 26 October and 7 November, visitors can book a session or drop into the museum's temporary studio for a smaller Rembrandt-inspired tattoo, priced from 100 to 300 euros. This is the second edition of the project: artists from Schiffmacher & Veldhoen first offered tattoos inspired by the Dutch master in a pop-up studio at the museum in 2023.

Museum director Milou Halbesma rejects the idea that the project is a stunt, describing it as being about content. Her argument is that the museum is devoted to craftsmanship, and that the tattoo studio opens up the craft of Rembrandt and his pupils as widely as possible. Tattoo artist Henk Schiffmacher points to the drama of the chosen etching, which shows the figures lowering Christ's body from the cross, and notes that the spine of the back almost becomes part of the cross in the composition.

Schiffmacher also sees a historical fit. He notes that Rembrandt painted seafarers and collected widely, and that tattooed sailors would have been a familiar sight in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century. Kwakernaak says he has long felt drawn to Rembrandt's religious imagery, not from faith but from the emotion in the faces and the sense of grief carried in a single image.