Wayra Pineda

For more than seven years, Wayra Pineda — known artistically as Atta — has tattooed across six countries: Spain, France, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Chile and the United States. Today she works from a private studio in East San José, California.

Her signature is photorealism in color: portraits, animals and scenes that look like they were painted with light. The same hand also works in black and grey, with a particular passion for cover-ups and scar transformation — turning the marks people wanted to hide into the art they wear with pride.

In October 2025, Atta took home Best of the Show at the Notorious Tattoo Expo with a full-color Venom piece — three days of work, nine to ten hours per day. It is, today, the most recent international award held by any realism artist working out of San José.

The work is rooted in something older than any award: nature, the sun, and our Andean ancestry. Every piece begins with a private consultation and a custom design — because a tattoo is forever, and trust is the only foundation that lasts as long.