I was curious your thoughts on aging in tattooing. As someone who recently turned 40 I have noticed ageism more and more in every aspect of society and its overwhelming presence in tattooing. Any insight to navigate it and challenge it while not reacting to fear and scarcity mentality?
[Image: living legend Apo Whang-od, a 103-year-old Filipina tattoo artist.]
I turned 35 this year, so I’m solidly in my mid-30s and it doesn’t feel the way I expected it to. I feel like a fake adult. When I’m at Flower World I’m like wow, can you believe they gave this STORE to me, a child?? This feeling is compounded when I try to do work outside of tattooing. I find myself running up against workplace norms and expectations (dress codes, spreadsheets) that make me feel like I’m doing adult drag. Tattooing is the space that I both credit and curse for this arrested development; it keeps me young while at the same time reminding me acutely of my age.
Tattooing has a somewhat contradictory relationship with age. In some ways it’s a young person’s industry; it’s harder and harder on the body as time goes on, and doing walk-ins ten hours a day, six days a week requires a young person’s stamina. At the same time, youth is equated with greenness and naivete in people new to the practice. I hear a lot of disdain for young tattooers in a way that neglects the fact that the industry NEEDS young people to continue the tradition and bring in new energy and perspective. I wonder sometimes if a shortcoming of the boom in self-taught artists is a loss of the intergenerational relationships that come with mentorship; a bridge between the established and the new.
I always noticed that at three years you were still considered “new” to tattooing. At five to eight years it was okay, you’ve been doing it for a little bit. The ten year mark felt like you’d finally been tattooing a decent amount of time. The industry does regard long-term experience as valuable and impressive, but this doesn’t always translate to the support and visibility we need to survive comfortably. As we get older, we often lose the ability to tattoo in the ways that are most valued by the average client. Our lines get shaky, our drawings less clean, our ability to tap into the current trends of visual culture wanes. Maybe we decide not to join the newest social media platform.
[Image: “Shanghai” Kate Hellenbrand, holding a tattoo machine and smiling in her studio.
Even getting tattooed often means being confronted by conventions about age. “But what about when you’re fifty?” is a common reaction to young people getting tattoos done, the implication being that tattoos are somehow a mark of youthful rebellion and unsuited to later life. The reaction is conservative and naïve, to be sure, but it touches on the field’s internal conflict between twenty-three and sixty, as if we don’t experience formative, vivid years in between.
This morning I was listening to “The Subtle Art of Appreciating ‘Difficult Beauty’” this morning, an episode of the Ezra Klein Show with Tressie McMillan Cottom and Chloé Cooper Jones where they spoke about the binary scale by which we often perceive ourselves- ugly vs. beautiful, young vs. old. Cooper Jones named the ways her disabled body is often already outside of that metric and excluded from evaluation by it, as if it were an impossibility that “disabled lives are real and legitimate.” Macmillan Cottom described the ways that her Blackness evaded many standards of evaluation, at least in the mainstream ways they are most applied, because she was always already excluded from them. It made me think about this question of aging and what we feel we lose when we encounter it. Youth inarguably grants all kinds of access. What access do we lose our grip on as we get older, and which did we have less of to begin with?
[Image: Jacci Gresham, the first known Black woman tattoo artist in the United States and owner of recently closed Aart Accent Tattoo in New Orleans.]
As a society we tend to have an incredibly short cultural memory. I find this to be sadly just as true in subcultural spaces where we theoretically have a deeper investment in maintaining our own lineages and records. Something that terrifies me is that I’ll mention Saved Tattoo (my old shop) to clients or young guest artists and they have never heard of it. This is a shop that existed in New York for over fifteen years (maybe more) and was a fixture of the community, known worldwide. It closed just two years ago, and already its memory feels like it’s slipping away every time I meet someone who never got to know it. This is what challenges me most about aging, or what makes me aware of my age. Attempting to connect over a shared memory, a shared knowledge or shared experience, and it failing. Fearing that the things I love, the things I know, will be forgotten and cease to exist.
But there’s so much to value about aging at the same time. Things I love about getting older: less FOMO. Caring less what other people think of me. Trusting my inner voice and intuition more. Cultivating experience that only comes with time. Seeing peers come into their own and celebrating their milestones. Not to mention how many incredible elders there are to look to and learn from (some of whom are pictured in this post). Of course, we can’t embrace romanticized ideas of aging and elders without addressing the structural inequalities that make it difficult for us— that make it near-impossible for elderly people to physically navigate city infrastructure or for freelancers to build retirement funds or have health insurance, that render people invisible or precarious once their labor value starts to decline. Sometimes I see older tattooers crowdfunding for medical bills or other critical needs, and it makes me feel an incredible pressure to build enough of a legacy for people to care about me when I’m old, like our reputations are our insurance policy later in life. Facing getting older is not just about getting right with aging in our hearts and minds, but about working towards a world that values and supports us at all stages of our lives.
I’ll be honest— I’m tired. I’m exhausted of feeling like I have to try to stay relevant by the newest standard, or to make sure that young people know who I am. I think what getting older has brought me, or what I’ve been trying to cultivate at least (to your question about how to navigate it) is a permission to let go of that pressure. I wish I had practical advice for you about self-promotion or visibility, but the way I’ve managed is to think less about those aspects of my practice. At a certain point I just can’t hit that moving target, and recognizing that opens me up to considering how else I can feel seen and appreciated. Fear strikes at times; cancellations or a day without new client emails makes me wonder if I’m falling from relevance. But a burden feels lifted when I remember that I can let go of the more, more, more, hustle mentality of my youth and trust that the ebbs and flows of tattooing and other work are for a reason. Sometimes they’re to remind us to push ourselves creatively, sometimes they’re a reminder to rest. At least for the moment, I’m happy to be reminded of the latter.
💜 IMPORTANT MUTAL AID REQUEST: 💜
My dear friend Faith, owner of Wish Me Luck Tattoo in Chicago, is having gender-affirming surgery two days from now. Please support her recovery process with whatever amount you can!
My book Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work is available via Afterlife Press.
If you’re interested in one-on-one consulting or troubleshooting, I offer that too.
So many feelings to hold with this experience of life and change and getting older it certainly is a trip. Thank you for your thoughts