Blog

Tattooing Makes Transition From Cult to Fine Art

Our Bodies, Our Ink

Among the first mainstream American celebrities to openly wear tattoos was Janis Joplin. On her left wrist, she had a Florentine bracelet. On her chest, she wore a small heart — the size of a candy heart. “Just a little treat for the boys,” she told Rolling Stone, “like icing on the cake.” It seems like only yesterday that tattoos were rarities, like certain crows. They were worth commenting upon, either for their beauty or their banality. Now tattoos creep like vines along the arms, legs and torsos of nearly everyone you meet. If print is dead, ink is undead — and on the move. There’s been some sophisticated fiction about skin and ink. I’m thinking especially of Sarah Hall’s novel “Electric Michelangelo,” a finalist for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. But it’s a lacunae in our literature that there hasn’t been a definitive nonfiction book on the topic, a volume that packs sociology and criticism and history and memoir into a dense sleeve, as a tattoo artist might put it, of meaning. While we await that book, we have Margot Mifflin’s perceptive and moving “Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo,” first published in 1997 but reissued now in a heavily updated and resplendently illustrated third edition. For most of history, tattooing has been a male preoccupation, either a one-fingered salute or an exercise in swagger. Think of Popeye and his twin anchors. Ms. Mifflin had the good idea to examine tattooing in the Western world from a female perspective. Her relatively slim book doesn’t provide a truly wide-angle view, but the insights she brings are insinuating and complex. This new edition of “Bodies of Subversion” arrives at the crest of a wave. For the first time, according to a 2012 Harris Poll, American women are more likely to be tattooed than men. Some 23 percent of women have tattoos; 19 percent of men do. They’re no longer rebel emblems, Ms. Mifflin notes. They’re a mainstream fashion choice. She is mostly an admirer of women’s tattoo culture. Tattoos have been “emblems of empowerment in an era of feminist gains,” she declares. They’re also “badges of self-determination at a time when controversies about abortion rights, date rape and sexual harassment” have made women “think hard about who controls their bodies.” Her book includes striking color photographs of the tattoos some women have had embroidered on their chests after mastectomies. Thanks to recent legislation, tattoo artists can sometimes directly bill insurance companies for this work. (If only Joplin had known that it would be possible to have your weed and your tattoos covered by insurance, she might have decided to stick around.) But Ms. Mifflin is a flinty observer. She notes that tattoos have the “ability to degrade as well as to enhance, to invoke the sacred and the inane.” She assesses the work of social critics who posit that tattooing can be a political cop-out, a cover for disengagement. These critics argue, she writes, that “tattooing shifts the focus of women’s issues from society to the self; that tattooed women are empowered only in their minds; and that women who find solace in tattoos are no different from women for whom shopping and exercise are substitutes for problem-solving.” Ouch, as the client said to the tattooist. “Bodies of Subversion” is delicious social history. Tattooing was an upper-class social fad in Europe in the late 19th century. Winston Churchill’s mother had a tattoo of a snake eating its tail (the symbol of eternity) on her wrist. The fad spread to America. In 1897, Ms. Mifflin writes, The New York World estimated that 75 percent of American society women were tattooed, usually in places easily covered by clothing. By the 1920s, tattooed women were mostly to be seen in freak shows and in circus acts, where they could make more money than tattooed men. They offered, the author avers, “a peep show within a freak show.” Tattoos lost their appeal for nearly everyone shortly after World War II. One reason was because “tattoos perpetrated in concentration camps had added a ghastly new chapter to tattoo history.” Ms. Mifflin’s story spins forward through the tattoo revival of the 1970s, when women with a tattoo or two began to shake the stigma that they were sexually available. She moves attentively through the 1980s and ’90s, the era that gave us Dennis Rodman, the lower-back tattoos now known as tramp stamps and a kudzu forest of copycat tribal tats. Her final chapter takes us up to the present day, with assessments of the tattoo artist Kat Von D’s fame and of cultural moments like the popularity of Stieg Larsson’s 2005 novel “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Ms. Mifflin appraises the work of famous female tattoists; she argues that the world needs tattoo critics. I hereby nominate Tim Gunn and Lil Wayne as the genre’s Siskel and Ebert. She is at her best when considering class and tattoos. She quotes an inked-up female doctor who says that it’s easier for professional women to wear them at work: “If you’re working some crummy little desk job with a dress code, it’s a lot harder to walk around wearing your tattoos in the open.” Ms. Mifflin deals, too, with the matter of tattoo regret. There’s plenty of that going around. She cites a survey by the Archives of Dermatology stating that 69 percent of tattoo removal requests come from women. Most got stamped at the age of 20 or so. Quoting the same survey, she says about tattoos, “Their marks of uniqueness ‘turned into stigmata.’ ” But the Harris Poll cited above also noted that 86 percent of tattooed people were content with their ink. Those who would shame women with tattoos often utter things like: How are those things going to look when you’re old and wrinkled? On the basis of the photographs of older women with tattoos in this book, I’d say they hold up pretty well. Read More

Keeping Their Art to Themselves

Iman Thomas would be the first to say that she is just not a cardigan kind of person. Nonetheless, her dresser drawers bulge with those demure long-sleeved sweaters, in colors ranging from rainbow to black. Even in the most torrid weather they’re part of her workday wardrobe in the employee benefits office at a Florham Park, N. J., insurance brokerage. This is how Ms. Thomas hides her tattoos: the inked images of the Virgin Mary and a dead girl crying bloody tears that fight for space on her right arm; the spider web that encircles her right elbow; the butterfly at rest on the inside of her right wrist; the rose in bloom on the inside of her left wrist. “There are parts of my body I wish I could get tattooed, but because I work in a corporate setting I have to keep them on a wish list,” she said. “This is a pretty buttoned-up company.” Ms. Thomas, 30, wore a cardigan to her job interview — preemptively and perhaps prudently — seven years ago, and remains grateful that the human resources manager never panned down to her right ankle, which bears a tattooed sword with a banner reading “Daddy” (when she meets with clients, on go Ms. Thomas’s black tights). “Nothing has ever been said, but you just kind of know what would be tolerated,” she said. Merely by glancing around, it’s clear that tattoos are no longer the sole province of gang members, garage mechanics, guys who are admirably confident that they will have the same girlfriend forever and Hollywood outliers like Angelina Jolie and Lena Dunham. Twenty-three percent of Americans have a tattoo, according to a Pew Research poll from 2010; and 32 percent of people ages 30 to 45 have at least one tattoo. But, like Ms. Thomas, a certain number of the tattooed work in sectors where it is considered undesirable, if not downright inappropriate, to wear your art on your sleeve. Sixty-one percent of human-resource managers asked last year in an annual survey by the Center for Professional Excellence at York College of Pennsylvania said a tattoo would hurt a job applicant’s chances, up from 57 percent in 2011. Suing over such a rejection is a dubious option. “No federal law prohibits employers from making a hiring decision because of a tattoo,” said Marc J. Scheiner, a senior associate specializing in employment law at Duane Morris, a law firm in Philadelphia. “But clearly you can’t discriminate on the basis of religion, so if someone has a religion-based tattoo, that may call for different analysis.” “When people ask, I say there’s a mix of legal and business considerations,” Mr. Scheiner said. “Sure, companies can have a dress-code policy of no tattoos. But I tell them to consider recruitment and retention issues.” Amy L. Hayden says that no one in a human-resources department has ever said anything to her about the elaborate floral design that starts at her collarbone and goes from shoulder to shoulder, the bird tattoo on her left wrist, the names of her two children inked on her inner left arm just below the initials of her late fiancé, and the Mayan-like etching that covers her right arm from shoulder to elbow a bit above a rendering of the flag of Chicago. “But I’m concerned and wonder if they play a role in my not getting hired,” said Ms. Hayden, 39, a writer and editor who moved to New York from Chicago last June. She said she had networked vigorously, applied for two to five jobs a day, and has had “a lot of first and second and third interviews — sometimes, it was down to me and another person, but I never got it.” Just before Thanksgiving, Ms. Hayden applied for a job as an editor at MarloThomas.com, a site on The Huffington Post. “I went through a phone and in-person interview with the staff, and then I had a meeting with Marlo,” she said. “I did cover up most of my tattoos but a few were visible. She didn’t say anything or give me funny looks, but I have a feeling that her seeing my tattoos had an impact, though it could just be that she clicked with someone more.” (E-mails to The Huffington Post about hiring and tattoos were not answered.) Ms. Hayden now has an unpaid internship at a small book publisher. She said that during her interview she was advised that her tattoos might be an obstacle when she started looking for a full-time position. The warmth of the welcome depends on the nature of the job in question and the company ethos. When Jakob Hunt worked in human resources at the clothing company H&M, “they cared about people being stylish,” he said. “They saw my tattoos as a plus.” Elana Goldberg, 22, a human-resources manager for Quantum Networks, an e-commerce firm, said she personally found tattoos objectionable. “But my company has a very open culture,” she said, and as a consequence, she recently hired a graphic designer with several tattoos. “When you’re introducing an employee to a client and you say ‘This is our designer,’ it’s assumed that that person may be a bit more artsy or free-spirited.” “My boss is very interested in a hipster environment,” she added. “He would never turn someone away because of that physical mark. If anything, it would make him even more attracted to the person.” But many with tattoos and with corporate jobs talk about being occasionally uncomfortable because of the covering-up they think it requires, like Ms. Thomas, or the sense of leading a double life. “I feel there’s the corporate Robert and the rock ’n’ roll Robert, and they are pretty much compartmentalized,” said Robert Conlin, 37, a senior practice manager for a health care system in Chicago whose tattoos cover his chest, mid-forearms and legs, and include stars, skulls, the word “goblin,” and a quotation from “Hamlet.” “I put on a suit and tie to come to work and then I go home and put on the black T-shirt. I think, ‘If they only knew what I looked like under all this.’ ” This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: April 25, 2013 Because of an editing error, the Skin Deep column last Thursday, about employees who feel the need to conceal their tattoos at work, misstated one of the findings of a Pew Research poll from 2010 about Americans with tattoos. It found that 32 percent of people aged 30 to 45 have a tattoo, not that 32 percent of Americans with tattoos are 30 to 45 years old. The error was repeated in a capsule summary in the Inside The Times index last Thursday on Page A2. Read More