I first got a tattoo at age 18, and continued to get tattooed fairly often throughout my late teens and early 20s. I want to investigate how this happened to me, and in my work I often get into telling the story of my first tattoo and the reasons for it: sharing with my client and subconsciously reaching out to bond. As the story has been repeated it has been elaborated upon and refined. Being tattooed was always a pretty personal experience for me, and the first one set the tone.

I brought no friends along; I told no one; I asked no one’s opinion of what I should get: essentially it was exemplary of what I experience now as a tattoo artist. Often people bring friends with them, and often MANY friends. I have been surrounded by crowds of 5, of 8, of 10 even, and though most tattoo artists would not tolerate this kind of atmosphere, I do, since my power of concentration is strong.

In all my personal tattooing though, I would go to the shop solo. I felt extremely out of place and perhaps I did not want to share my discomfort with a friend. I would almost sneak in, be ignored by the guys working behind the counter, and peruse the portfolios with an unforgiving eye. However uncomfortable I was, I still knew what I was looking for.

I looked for a steady line, an artistic talent that extended beyond tattoo flash–basically someone with a rock-solid hand who would not alter my ideas in any way. I always had my own design, sandwiched in my sketchbook. In retrospect, I misused amazing artists. Both Doug Love and Holly Ellis were forced by me to do another artist’s work, to trace exactly the sculpted lines of another. However beautiful their portfolios were, I disregarded their own natural talent. I could not help it though. My artistic heroes had died fifty to one hundred years before, and I wanted to be emblazoned with the work of these dead men who had made me into an artist at the youngest age that I could remember.

With each tattoo I have felt more myself. For some, tattooing is a work of metamorphosis, of forgetting your old self and forging a new life, of commemoration of the self as a parent, of rebirth in some way. I have always felt that I was an illustrated person on the inside, and the more intricate and colorful I became the more I felt comfortable in my skin. Almost none my tattoos are governed by fads, and in this way I am outside a large part of the tattooed culture in America. I don’t say this as a way to feel superior–it’s just a fact.

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.”

Some squirm, some sweat profusely, a few hum under their breath to take their mind off the excruciating sensations that I cause. Sometimes I am disconnected from their pain, I forget what they are feeling and pull a longer line, or skip around to different parts of the tattoo, shocking skin where pain has dulled. My own back hurts, my arm and hand with its slowly developing tattoo muscles, (what I like to refer to as the tattooist’s “Crab Claw”,) aches and freezes in a clench, and I think only about myself. But this disconnection happens rarely. Tattooing is an intimate act.

Mostly as I tattoo I become extremely aware of my client. I am concentrating completely on the square inch of skin beneath my needles, but there is still a subconscious part of me that is hyper-attuned–to their breathing (or lack of it), their shifting, where they are looking, and their plummeting pain tolerance or tiredness. Often I surprise the client by prompting them to take deep breaths (they weren’t aware that they stopped breathing,) or by saying that maybe we both need a stretch break when someone is getting extra figety or has stopped talking. Perhaps it has something to do with being that close to a person, and to be the one that they have employed to take them through, for lack of a better term, the “journey’ of their tattoo. I can smell them, I am touching them, our bodies are close together, and this is something that as an artist you just have to get used to.

I noticed when I first began covering my arms with tattoos that my skin no longer belonged to me. People have a natural impulse to touch and stroke tattooed skin (though if the tattoo is well executed you’re not going to feel anything.) The clerk at the mini-mart would catch my bare arm –petting and turning it, some would even peel up my sleeves, especially people at parties and bars when alcohol dissolved their sense of reserve. Similarly, I now have no qualms in touching other people. In my job, when I start a consultation for a tattoo I usually am touching the person within minutes. Whereas before I gave everyone the generally-accepted three-foot bubble of personal space, I now turn complete stranger’s arms and shoulders, lift their clothes, look at the play of muscle as they move, and assess their skin’s pigmentation and sun-damage on different parts of their body.

This is my job. Skin is my new canvas, and I am not so much an artist as an illustrator on this surface. The client is the one with the idea, I am hired artisan with my machines and needles and ink.

Every day I cause people pain.