Percy Lemaigre darkened the doorway of my tattoo shop soon after I opened for business. Sacred Heart Tattoo in Vancouver's affluent West Side neighborhood of Point Grey was Vancouver's first tattoo shop to open in over fifteen years and was instantaneously an overnight success. The early 90's was a renaissance era for tattooing as a new generation of young people were discovering tattoos. Not wanting to patronize the dusty old biker shops of yesteryear, our would-be customers were eager to find tattoo artists who were young, groovy, forward thinking art school graduates more at home riding skateboards than chopper motorcycles. Percy had caught wind of how busy our tattoo shop was getting and as a tattoo artist himself, he came looking for work.The first time Percy asked me for a job I turned him down. I didn't like his vibe. He looked like a middle aged indigenous Canadian Mr T with his Mohawk hairstyle, wispy Fu-Manchu mustache, leather vest and giant gold chains laying over an unbuttoned blue work shirt. Every finger on his hand was ensconced within giant gold rings of eagles and skulls. At an earlier point in his life Percy had passed out drunk on some train tracks so he walked around with a wooden leg. Not taking no for an answer, Percy came back a few times asking for a job. Eventually I relented and gave him a chair to tattoo in. I appreciated his perseverance and frankly, with it being just me in the shop I desperately needed someone else to help with customers and his tattooing wasn't bad, actually I thought that his tattooing was cleaner and technically more accurate than my own.
Customers loved Percy. In contrast to his gruff appearance, he was quite charming with a mischievous smile and an uncharacteristically calming bedside manner. He specialized in making beautiful west coast Haida style first nations tattoos. Although he was himself Métis (a mixture of European and aboriginal ancestry) the white college kids that were our customers felt that getting Haida style tattoos from a bonafide native Indian was authentic enough. It wasn't long until I realized that Percy's charm was coming from an insidious place of narcissism and psychopathy. I confronted Percy one day after hearing negative feedback from customers about shitty statements he was making about the quality of my own tattooing and my leadership as shop owner. I asked him if he had respect for me as his employer and he flatly said "no". I fired him the day before Christmas, just a few days before his second child was due to arrive. He gave me no choice.
Several months after Percy was discharged from my shop I had heard that he had opened his own tattoo shop across town on Vancouver's bohemian Commercial Drive. I visited Percy one day at his shop, told him that I had no hard feelings about the past and I wished him well. I would even refer some of my customers to him when they asked for authentic Haida style tattooing. There was an ethic in the Vancouver artist community at that time where it was good form to refer customers to the right tattoo artist for the job, even if that meant steering a potential customer to the competition. It was the Canadian share and share alike way of doing business.
Percy's shop didn't last long. Soon after opening an article appeared in the Vancouver Sun featuring a story of Percy sexually assaulting a young woman who had come to get her newlywed husband's name tattooed on her breast. During the tattoo application, it was alleged that Percy had exposed his penis to his client when asked "where the most painful tattoo he had ever gotten" was, standard customer - artist small talk during a session. After finishing the tattoo he leaned in and sucked on her nipple. Criminal charges were filed by the victim and the City of Vancouver repealed his tattoo shop's business license.
Effectively, Percy was run out of town after being exposed for his lecherousness but his troubles followed him to Fort McMurray, Alberta where he had opened yet another tattoo shop. In 2007 Percy was charged with five counts of sexual assault, two counts of sexual assault with a weapon and one count of forced bestiality. Percy had raped a female customer, choked her, held a knife to her throat and forced her to fellate his dog. He videotaped the entire assault, which the Crown Prosecutor used to seal his criminal conviction.
Percy's story is not an isolated incident. Stories of sexual abuse have always been rife in Vancouver's tattoo and body piercing community. In the early days of the body piercing scene, the only place to get your tongue or navel pierced was in the back room of Mack's Leather, a seedy Bondage and Sadomasochism sex toy store which was once nestled deep within what's now the Granville Entertainment District - a promenade of bars and nightclubs. Paul the body piercer, a slovenly, disheveled man with uncomfortably tight shorts and a bare gut that hung exposed out from underneath a black polo shirt was notorious for flashing his penis unprovoked to show off the stainless steel hardware sticking through it. "If you were gonna get pierced by Paul, you were gonna see his dick!" Everyone would always laugh about it. Having Paul pull his penis out of his shorts was just the initiation process of acquiring a new piercing. Allegedly this behavior lasted for years until Mack's went out of business and the body piercing trade graduated from the underbelly of the BDSM world and into more sophisticated body piercing boutiques that catered to clean cut kids visiting from the 'burbs.
More recently sexual assault allegations were leveled through the now defunct Victim's Voices Tattooing Canada Instagram account against two more Canadian tattoo artists. According to CTV News Dave Hadden of Carne Tattoo in Victoria, B.C. digitally penetrated his client's vagina and kept his fingers inserted inside her for half of a four hour tattoo session. Although the client complained of the assault to Carne Tattoo's management, Hadden remained on staff for two years following the alleged assault and it wasn't until the story was broken on Instagram and in the news that Hadden was eventually fired.
Also in Victoria, tattoo artist Corey Lyon of Painted Lotus Tattoo was accused by a female customer of sexual assault through the Victim's Voices Instagram page, with the story republished on CTV News, claiming that Lyon began his assault by physically lifting her onto a procedure table. She made the following public statement: "That's when the little lightbulb in my head went on and I realized this was sexual. This was close to another particularly traumatizing sexual assault experience so I froze up and allowed everything else that happened to happen including aggressive oral sex."
The Victim's Voices Tattooing Canada Instagram page launched on July 4th and within two weeks it had already garnered over 25 thousand followers. Some of the survivor stories were harrowing tales of brutal sexual assault and online sexual harassment. Other stories were cautionary tales of experiences had with creepy tattoo artists leveraging their position to coerce clients into unwanted sexual scenarios.
On July 12th Victim's Voices Tattooing Canada posted a statement claiming that they were closing their page at midnight as survivors who had shared their stories had become exposed to threats of violence. The stories of Dave Hadden and Cory Lyon were not unique. Before shutting down, the Victim's Voices page had published accounts of sexual assault and harassment from survivors of dozens of Canadian tattoo artists, with new stories exposing more artists getting posted several times daily.
Although the Victim's Voices page is now gone, the discussion is just getting started. The tattoo industry is long overdue for an examination of how tattoo artists and body piercers can abuse trust and leverage their positions of power over clients. Tattoo shops typically have no structures in place to prevent and mitigate abuses, rather these discussions never occur until it's too late and a tattoo shop is forced into a state of damage control. From a tattooer's perspective, most of the time tattooing for a living seems like barely a real job and it's not uncommon to have customers shower you with praise, flirt with you and sometimes professional lines become blurred and consensual sexual relationships occur but the key word is 'consent' and all of the aforementioned stories of sexual misconduct share a lack of implied consent.
As professional tattooers and body piercers we must concede that we have to do better than what we're doing right now because our clients deserve better. We must admit that we have a pervasive problem within our industry and we need to become more proactive and flexible in creating protocols that protect our customers and coworkers. We need to recognize that the cost of ignoring this problem will be destroyed careers, destroyed reputations, destroyed tattoo shops and most importantly the cost of damage inflicted upon the lives of the victims.
It should be the right of our clients to insist on having a chaperone either in the procedure area or at least within view from the shop's waiting room. I personally have my entire tattoo studio wired with video cameras and I record every tattoo session for the safety of myself and my customer. Tattoo shop owners need to sit down with their artists and have candid conversations about what is and isn't appropriate behavior while reinforcing that there will be real consequences for indiscretions done both on premises and outside of the shop including sending unsolicited dick picks or text invitations for sexual encounters. When it is required for a client to disrobe to get tattooed, which is often necessary, permission must be asked with an explanation as to why clothing has to be removed and options for modesty should be made available such as pasties or a towel. Tattooers must understand the power that they have when working on people's bodies and that getting tattooed is a vulnerable experience for everyone.
Time's up tattooers.
Adam Sky
Moringstar Tattoo Parlor
Belmont, California
