In a world where Dave Navarro hosts the competition reality show "Ink Master" and every mall has its own tattoo parlor, where does a true believer in tattoo culture go for inspiration? For Scott Campbell, the answer was Mexican prisons. "I was looking for a way to fall in love with tattooing again," said Campbell, the Southern-born, Brooklyn-based founder of Saved Tattoo, who is renowned for both his artwork and for having inked the likes of Marc Jacobs and Terry Richardson. Prison tattoo culture holds a certain amount of gravity. There's a population given orange suits and known by numbers - it's homogenized - tattoos claim the little personality that these guys can have. That world informed a series of ink paintings that Campbell will unveil tomorrow at OHWOW in Los Angeles in a new exhibition called "Things Get Better." The pictures depict his "Frankenguns," jury-rigged contraptions he built inside Mexican prisons to administer tattoos to inmates - a personal project he pursued two years ago as an antidote to the superficiality of the contemporary tattoo world. "This has been an exercise in freedom," Campbell said. Here, the artist explains what he had to do to create his D.I.Y. tattoo guns, and the art that ensued. Frequent thrift stores. I'll go to Goodwill or salvage shops. Or I go to 99-cent stores to find anything with an electric motor in it. A lot of it is plastic silverware, packing tape and paper clips. Befriend prison officials. I could have never pulled this off in the United States because of regulations, but in Mexico, I'd buy the warden a nice bottle of scotch and got his secretary some flowers and that made things a lot easier. I donated all these things to the prison, like VCRs and guitars, and once we got onto the other side we'd take them all apart and make them into machines. Make a different gun for each person getting inked. If you reuse them, there's a huge risk of cross-contamination. Because you make one for each person, each is a really personalized object. That's kind of how I came about the painting project. Every painting is of a different machine. Discover the project's aesthetic possibilities. My favorite thing I took away from the experience were these machines - they were reflective of making things out of such limited resources, and I wanted to give them more of a presence and power. Soon I was building the machines with a painting mind. I would make these constructions as compositions, incorporating different materials or repeated parts to create a motif. Experiment with different materials. I'm trying to be as versatile and diverse as possible and explore different textures - scrap pieces of wood, using the wood grain and splinters as part of the machine, parts of rubber and melting plastic together. The work isn't just about creating a machine and documenting it straight on. It's treating the construction as the composition of the painting. Embrace imperfection. There has been more than one occasion where people have come in for studio visits and they've walked out with a bleeding arm or ankle. When you're doing tattoos with a melted cassette tape and a safety pin, it's not as flawless as if you're using proper equipment - yet it's so much nicer. It's literally handcrafted. Perfect isn't always the point. Except when it comes to your betrothed (the actress Lake Bell). She's a virgin! I like that she doesn't have tattoos, and I almost don't want her to get one. I will carry the tattoos of the family. "Things Get Better" is on view from May 23 to June 22 at OHWOW, 937 North La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles; oh-wow.com.