Dudes want dragons and girls want flowers. We are pinned to the stereotype of our gender and cannot escape.

Dudes want dragons. Big, twisting, “sick-looking” scaly beasts perhaps in a Japanese style, curling around their bulging muscle or the idea of a bulging muscle, dangerous and imbued with strength and power. They want dragons that are red and green and blue–but never purple, yellow or light teal. They want dragons with claws, with teeth, with danger and with a sort of wisdom that comes from an eternity of danger.

Girls want flowers, trailing and delicate, to spill across the curves of their hips, to coil around their shoulders, to represent growth and beauty and perhaps (unknowingly) fecundity. They want the idea of fragrance, of spiraling beauty and femininity, of vivid life. There’s nothing harsh or dangerous about flowers–the only confrontational thing is the thorns of the rose or the extreme phallic stamen of the most popularly tattooed flower these days, the hibiscus.

We are socially-conditioned, gendered beings, and this becomes emphatically clear in typical men or womens’ choices of tattoo design. It almost seems that we fall back on what we had affections for in childhood and early teen years–perhaps because those were the last years that we were really in love with certain self-defining images? Think of the kid in class who the other students crowd around because he can draw the most perfect shiny motorcycle or the girls who spend allowance money on notebooks adorned with smooth airbrushed images of dolphins leaping into the night sky to form a perfect heart. The girls that loved horses and unicorns to a strange obsessive degree and the boys fixated on the collection of small cardboard cards with pictures on them of monsters, wizards and yes, dragons.

It’s hard to think of adults as having these same affections for certain self-defining images (beyond the consumer-definition: of the car you drive or the brand of clothes you wear or the pet you own), but tattoo is a visual world, and a world where these dreams come out and come true. It’s endlessly interesting what people see within themselves and what they choose to get ritualistically inscribed on their skin. It doesn’t often matter whether the tattoo is purely aesthetic or has some deep meaning. We are little girls and boys at heart, in our pink and blue bedrooms. I should know, with my arms and their tattooed flowers and fairies, hearts and angels

Surely endless papers could be written on the subject of the erotic implications of men inscribing dragons of serpentine phallicism on themselves, while women prefer the vulvic sex organs of plants, brilliantly colored, soft and inviting. I only point out an overall observation–of course there are many many exceptions. Roses are a popular masculine flower–the thorns serve to make them a bit dangerous I think. Some designs are popular with both men and women–stars are considered ungendered, as are trees and phoenixes (coincidentally two of my most popular themes since I started tattooing).

As a shop where both of the artists are female, we receive quite a bit of business from women (and men) who feel male tattoo artists have rendered their designs too harsh or bold. We are expected to have more finesse and grace in our drawings, and obviously more femininity. This also works the other way around. When a tattoo design goes emphatically against the gender and perceived persona of the client receiving it sometimes it causes a bit of discomfort in the tattoo artist as well.

This has happened to me, and as the artist you have to fight against your own preconceived notions. I recall a very slight, sweet, soft spoken female client of mine, probably about 20 years old and very pretty, who commissioned from me a huge back-piece of a gnarled, bumpy old tree–like a live oak or a bristle-cone pine. In my first sketch I smoothed bumps and added graceful curves to the tree. I thinned the tree to fit with the curve of the clients back–I felt like I was making the image to fit her image. Or rather, my image of her. This was my mistake. The client had come in with a picture of an existing tattoo she had found on the internet and obviously she had connected completely with the image as it was. I ended up redrawing it with all the cracks and bulges and knots and gnarls (amended quite a bit so as not to copy the poor owner of the original internet tattoo), and she loved it. Perhaps it was what she felt on the inside, who knows? I learned a lesson then which was about MY own stereotyping and resolved to listen better to clients from then on. I can have my opinions but I will keep them to myself. Who knows what people are like on the inside? Their dragons and their flowers and their gnarled oak trees help them express what is unseen to the outside world and the fact that it’s a tattoo lets people know they’re serious. That’s the nature of the medium.

So are we aesthetically bound by our genders? The other day at the shop, our counterperson Bob was walking by Jess’s drawing table upon which rested a fresh sketch of a huge coiled snake, black shiny scales and beady slit eyes.

“Who’s that for?” he asked.

“It’s for a girl who is coming in in a couple weeks,” Jess replied.

Bob stopped in his tracks and a grin spread over his face.

“Awesome.”