In 2019, I visited Tulsa, Oklahoma for a project with Resonance Tulsa and Atomic Culture. Working with Ritual Electric Tattoo as a guest artist, I provided free cover-up and re-working of tattoos for women who had been formerly incarcerated, recording short interviews with them before and after the tattoo process. As a volunteer arts instructor teaching tattoo drawing at Rikers Island at the time, I had begun to observe the ways that people impacted by incarceration were some of the last to benefit from the popular mainstreaming of tattoo culture. Often relying on a distancing between tattooing’s “criminal past” (“It used to be only sailors and criminals had tattoos”) and its implied contemporary status as an art form for “respectable people,” mainstream tattooing was reinforcing a division between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” tattooing that further affected people who couldn’t erase their history with the prison system.
In a flash challenge on Ink Master’s season 1, contestants were brought into a “prison” to tattoo “inmates” with single-needle pieces. After sufficient reaction shots like the one above, it was revealed the clients were actors.
I had been working with one of the supervisors at Rikers to develop a tattoo cover-up program, where I would support students in conceiving and designing their own cover-up and pair them with an artist to execute it once they were released. Due to changes in leadership, the program we imagined never came to fruition. A frequent argument against tattoo programming was that tattoo content was “gang-related,” a designation that was often applied arbitrarily and dictated by the personal taste of officers (I wrote a bit about gang designations in a past newsletter). Frustrated by how reductive the DOC’s view of tattooing was, I was determined to collect testimonies about the positive implication of access to tattoo art and images. In my class alone, we had used tattoo art as a vehicle to discuss identity, personal history, our value systems, and family ties, among much more.