An Open Secret: The Pervasive Problem of Sexual Assault in the Tattoo Industry

Trigger Warning: Extremely graphic descriptions of sexual assault, abuse and sexual coercion. 

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

Times Up, No More Ink

Downtown Oakland, California

The tattoo apocalypse unfolded like the beginning of Shaun of the Dead. As we plodded about our day the background noise of the beginning of the end began to permeate our consciousness. A news program in the other room shows doctors in yellow biohazard suits pushing stretchers in a country on the other side of the world, the chyron  at the bottom of the screen scrolls through a death toll. Soon line ups at the grocery stores start to get long and tempers get short as people become fixated with hording Tylenol and toilet paper. Every passing conversation is about the coronavirus and fear of the breakdown of our daily routines, possibly even a breakdown of society. Be it wilful ignorance or denial, nobody really believed that the entire world was about to come to a shuddering halt. Was this really happening?

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