Tim Kern in Fujiyama, Japan Courtesy of Tim Kern

Synecdoche, New York is the hotly anticipated directorial debut from Charlie Kaufman, the eccentric writer behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation and Being John Malkovich. His trippy scripts, which examine the nature of memory, love and identity in bizarre new ways, feature elevators that stop between floors to reveal alternate universes, a blocked writer who jumps into his own screenplay and a machine that erases the heartbreak of losing a lover with Kool-Aid colored hair.

This time around, Kaufman stepped behind the camera when frequent collaborator Spike Jonze, the director originally attached, bowed out to helm Where the Wild Things Are. The flick stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard, a theater director whose new play calls for a warehouse-sized replication of New York. The title is both a nod to the city where it takes place, Schenectady, NY, and the SAT bonus word that means "[a] figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (as fifty sail for fifty ships), the whole for a part (as society for high society), the species for the genus (as cutthroat for assassin), the genus for the species (as a creature for a man), or the name of the material for the thing made (as boards for stage)," according to Merriam-Webster. Caden's world and his work collide in his complicated relationships with the women around him: his ex Adele, played by Catherine Keener; her friend Maria, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh; his daughter Olive, played by Robin Weigert; his wife Claire, played by Michelle Williams. Subplots and intertwining relationships unpack themselves like Russian nested dolls.

Just as a piece can represent the whole, so can tattoos represent larger themes in the wearer's life. In Synecdoche, New York, Robin Weigert's character has a full-body tattoo of flowers and vines wrapping around her right leg, back, chest, shoulder, right arm and part of her right hand. Premiere got a sneak peek of the amazing designs and how they came to be from the man behind Olive Cotard's tattoo designs, tattooist Tim Kern. A seventh-generation twin with carny blood in his veins, the in-demand artist travels the world to tattoo clients from New York and Los Angeles to Japan and Italy.

Tim Kern painting Robin Weigert behind the scenes of Synecdoche, New York Courtesy of Tim Kern

Tell me about how you were approached to do this.
I got really lucky. One of my [tattoo] clients, Frank Murray, was an accountant on the movie, and when he found out that they were looking for a tattoo artist, he recommended they talk to me... Strangely enough, their offices were 2 blocks away from the [tattoo] shop. So they [Naomi Donne, key makeup artist, and Judy Chin, makeup department head] just walked over and talked to me about it. I showed them my portfolio and they really liked what they saw.

Had you ever worked on a movie before?
I never worked on a movie before, but I worked on a TV show. I worked on an episode of CSI: NY doing a fake tattoo design on a female [victim's] chest. And they also based a character in that episode on me, which was pretty funny.

What did the character do?
He was a tattoo artist and he was the one who killed the girl.

Did you use Temptu [the paint used for the tattoos in Synedoche, New York among other films and publications] then, too?
That time we didn't use Temptu; we used a transfer method that was similar to those little rub-on tattoos you can get out of a gumball machine, but much higher quality. I don't know the name of that specific process. But it was some sort of water-based thing — pretty temporary.

So you're not actually affiliated with Temptu? That's just the makeup they used for Synecdoche, New York?
It was actually the first time I've ever used the Temptu paints, so it was really interesting. It reminded me a lot of [painting with] watercolors, which I used to do a lot when I was in school. And it worked pretty well. I was pretty happy with how they looked after it was all done. It took me a little bit to get used to the medium — you have to thin it with alcohol instead of water. But it definitely made the final product look very realistic.