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| Downtown Oakland, California |
During the first few weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, tattooers were faced with an ethical conundrum. There was a need to stay open, make tattoos and make customers happy knowing that there was a risk involved in making the tattoo shop a vector for the virus. At first, there was a lot of contradictory and unreliable information about COVID-19 and how it transmits between people and just how infectious the virus was. Many shops put mitigating protocols in place by asking customers who were feeling under the weather to kindly reschedule their appointment, doorknobs got an extra spritz of disinfectant spray and customers arriving for their appointments got introduced to the hand washing basin. As stories got out of how the virus was transmissible as vapor droplets hanging in the air and just how life threatening the disease actually was, it became clear that there were really no sanitary protocols a tattoo shop could implement that would be able to keep customers and artists truly safe. The time to close shop was coming. I liberated a bottle of Cavicide wipes from the store room so I could wipe down my groceries before bringing them into the house. The entire world started to feel like the inside of a dirty tattoo shop scrub station.
The San Francisco Bay Area was early to impose shelter-in-place restrictions. The tech giants of Silicon Valley ordered employees to work from home in the beginning of March. Trust the purveyors of all of our personal data to see the writing on the wall early. Then a week later schools closed and all festivals and gatherings were halted. It was then that I began bargaining with myself as to when I would close my own tattoo shop. Closing felt like the right thing to do but I had ignored and denied the problem for so long that I didn't feel adequately financially prepared to stand by my morals of not allowing my own shop to be a conduit for infecting my community. There's an old saying in tattooing, "a tattooer's morals are as high as his billfold is thick". I told myself to keep tattooing until the end of the week, then shut it down but it was on that same day that the San Mateo county health department ordered all tattoo shops and other non-essential businesses to temporarily close. I no longer had the luxury of choice. I put a few finishing touches on a Tiki themed totem tattoo then shuttered the shop for the remainder of the pandemic crisis, for however long that would be.
Even with months of downtime ahead of me, I struggled to feel motivated to create art. The world was suddenly completely upside down. Let's get honest, tattooing in the grand scheme of things isn't really important. It may be an invaluable part of human expression and is a timeless part of the human experience but in the event of a pandemic where people must put physical distance between each other to survive, tattooing no longer seemed to matter anymore. My identity and my sense of self-worth is completely invested in my tattooing, it's who I am and who I've been for my entire adult life. When I was ten years old I would hide under the blankets at night with a flashlight, drawing tattoos. I knew what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be from the time I was old enough to wrap my fingers around a Crayon. Now I felt paralyzed.
There's no history of precedent with tattooing within a world pandemic. The only time remotely comparable would be the Spanish Flu of 1918 but tattooing then had not yet interwoven with modern culture outside of gypsy carnivals and bowery sailor shanties. Tattoos were done then in the tents of traveling carnival shows, not even yet on pike boardwalks or in the back of barber shops. Tattooing has been banned before during times of health emergencies. Tattooing was banned in New York City in 1961 during a hepatitis B outbreak and the ban wasn't lifted until 1997.
Tattooing is a 'recession proof' trade and my personal experience would support this assertion. Tattooing is a staple of human expression that transcends time and culture. I tattooed through the fallout of a post 9/11 world and I remained busy during the Great Recession. There is an urge to get tattooed to where people will sacrifice their needs for food and shelter in order to get inked up. Fuck food, fuck rent. I need to get a tattoo! Even during my time locked down at home social distancing, clients are texting me coy messages, inquiring if I'm still tattooing on the down low. Although I am not, I know that many tattooers are doing exactly this, secretly.
Certainly, we will as an entire species spend at least the next year, possibly longer, living with this pandemic. Until there are solutions such as a vaccine or until the virus mutates into something less lethal and less contagious, normal as we've known it no longer exists.
When we come out on the other side of the pandemic, whatever that will look like, tattooing will be different, not unrecognizable but inexorably changed. It's unavoidable. This crisis is the crucible to which we make a new world for ourselves but how will this apply to tattooing? This is what I like to call The Great Brush Fire and any old structures that no longer properly serve our needs will be easily exposed and will not survive this. Brace yourselves because it's going to get painful.
Tourist tattoo shops will likely be hardest hit, sadly, their future is surely bleak. The ubiquitous tourist trap shops of Venice Beach would be an example of an incapability to operate when people are scared of large crowds and in need of financial recovery before being able to consider leisure travel. Who's next? Big shops with high operating overhead are enormously exposed during these months of no revenue and the ensuing economic downturn that will undoubtedly be beset upon us as we begin to pick up the pieces of our lives. Many tattooers that I've spoken to are afraid that they are going to lose their shops. I worry about suicides and accidental drug overdoses amongst my peers. It's the uncertainty of when we can resume tattooing that's the hardest. Will we be back to work in a matter of weeks? How long will we be able to hold back the descent into anarchy? So far government social assistance programs are largely inaccessible to out of work tattooers who are mostly considered independent contractors and do not qualify for unemployment insurance or paycheck protection stimulus. The deck is stacked against the American work-a-day tattoo artist.
So what will tattooing look like when we all get out of tattoo jail? I can make a few guesses. About half the shops in your city will be gone as will the jobs tattooers had before they closed. Shop owners with savings, who were good with their money, who owned the building they occupied or who are good at negotiating business are best suited to adapt but if you're a tattooer reading this, you know that these aforementioned kinds of folks are the minority in our community. I predict that tattooing as an industry will retract dramatically. As shops shut they'll be replaced with private studios, many going unregistered and unlicensed as tattooers scramble to find accommodations to ply their craft. Tattooing will also have to conform to new customs and expectations for the prevention of the spread of the 'rona. Expect an increase in internet interactions between clients and artists like video chat consultations and less handshaking and hugs when in person. Masks and aprons will become required P.P.E. as much as latex examination gloves became de rigor for tattooing during the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the late 80's.
The urge to get tattoos and to do tattoos is part of what it means to be human. We sometimes stifle it with social norms and religious expectations but even at it's most suppressed, it continues to exist among the outlaws and the lowest viewed members of society. When tattooing is permitted to flourish unhindered by oppressive regulations or societal taboo, it expands every year, exponentially into once unimaginable possibilities of beauty and technical precision. It's this profound human urge to get tattooed that gives me faith in the resilience of this profession that I've devoted my life to.
I know that it's going to be okay.
Adam Sky
Belmont, California
