Sergio García Sánchez and Lola Moral’s “Artist in Training”

For many of us, spending time at the beach is one of the highlights of summer. The cover of the August 25, 2025, issue, by the artist Sergio García Sánchez and his wife, the colorist Lola Moral, is inspired by a different feeling. “As a child, I got very bored at the beach, so I spent the whole day inventing things to do to escape the tedium of lying around sunbathing,” García Sánchez said.

García Sánchez teaches at the University of Granada, where many of his students are tattooed; some do their coursework on the medium. The designs in this image are known as “American traditional,” and are inspired by Norman Keith Collins (1911-73), a prominent Hawaii-based artist known as Sailor Jerry. “Sailor Jerry created a very powerful iconography that lives on through tributes paid by tattoo artists of new generations,” García Sánchez said.