I’m a tattooer, but sometimes when people ask what I do for work I lie and say something else. Usually I say I’m an accountant or work in tech. I feel guilty lying, but sometimes I just don’t want to talk about tattooing with strangers when I’m not at work.
This past week I attended an oral history conference. It was my first time at an academic conference after having graduated from my oral history program earlier this month. I was in an Uber on my way to the conference hotel one morning and my driver, making conversation, asked what I do for work.
“I’m an oral historian,” I told him. Not a lie, not the whole truth.
I’ve been trying the job title on since I started school. It’s felt good, really good to start interactions on a different foot than I have for the last thirteen years. Like the doctor who finds themselves diagnosing rashes at parties, or the lawyer who dispenses free legal advice at every family reunion, tattoo artists are often (maybe more often than not) put in a position to talk tats at length even when we’re off the clock. And it’s not just talk. I once had a man take his shirt off in line at a coffeeshop to show me his tattoo. I had a cashier at a clothing store pull up her shirt to show me a slightly infected-looking stomach piece while I was trying to pay for a pair of pants. It’s not much of a surprise that at times, someone might want to avoid these interactions entirely and create a fiction in a low-stakes social exchange.
I’ve definitely done it. I’ve done it on airplanes, on the subway, while waiting for a table at a restaurant. Sometimes I’ve simply said I’m an artist, and when people ask “what kind of art?” I just say I make paintings and ceramics. One reason is that I’ve had some version of the same conversation an exhausting number of times over the years, to the point that I could script the exchange in my sleep. If it feels slightly disingenuous to name one thing I do and conveniently leave out the others, it feels nearly as disingenuous to pretend I haven’t had the same conversation a thousand times before; to fake chuckle at the same joke, to muster up the expected encouragement when someone asks for a price quote with visual aids pulled up on their iPhone while you try to put in your lunch order, to be diplomatic when someone wants your “honest professional opinion” on whether or not their artist fucked up their tattoo. I’m even less incentivized to be honest when the lead-up is something like “You have a lot of tattoos! Is your boyfriend a tattoo artist?” or “You must like pain <leering>.” A friend of mine who is a piercer told me he lies about work all the time because other men will immediately ask gross questions about how many genital piercings he’s done. There’s also always the possibility that someone might have strong anti-tattoo opinions and you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of a lecture about defiling the sanctity of your flesh temple.
Artists pretending we work in tech. [Image: a tweet from @swthiede saying “Love to touch computer all day for money”]
It’s not that I don’t like talking about tattoos. I can’t stop talking about tattoos, actually. They’re the focus of my oral history work and much of my research and writing. Part of the magic of tattoos is the coded visual language, the instant connection when you meet a stranger who has a piece by the same artist, or when you can bond over a natural fluency in a shared interest. What feels bad about the repetitive public exchanges are the parts that come across as entitled, and the social norms that make us feel rude if we’re honest and say “I just worked all day and I’d like to enjoy my time outside of the job.” There’s the demand of unpaid labor and the fact that we’d be so happy to spend an hour talking about someone’s next tattoo idea if they had just booked a consultation during our work hours. Then there’s the added layer of resentment around the assumption that creative work isn’t really work, and that creatives always want to talk at length about their passions.
I started trying out saying I was an oral historian because it seemed so different, so worlds apart, from entering a social exchange as a tattoo artist. What’s struck me is that the job title invites just as much sharing from strangers, but in a way that I more easily welcome. As I get to know a new field and work towards a different practice, it’s been a way to try on the new version of self I’m embarking on and take it for a test run. Introducing myself by saying “I’m an oral historian” has been an opportunity to explain something that’s new and invigorating for me right now. It’s a prompt in and of itself that invites storytelling. It’s clear that people want to share about themselves and when an opportunity to do so presents itself, people are excited to take it. I think what feels different is that it doesn’t ask me for my expertise or put my professional knowledge before any other kind of exchange; instead, it invites a type of learning on my part. It’s the same type of learning I love to do when getting to know someone during a tattoo, and when asked how I came to oral history from tattooing I always say tattooing is all about accessing narrative. I’ll usually mention I’m also a tattooer eventually, but leading with something else creates a chance for something different.
When I told my Uber driver I was an oral historian, his eyes lit up.
“I love history more than anything. I have never had a historian as a passenger before,” he said. He was Iranian and Armenian, and told me stories from his countries’ histories. I had coincidentally gone to a presentation by a sociolinguist researching how Armenian men immigrating to the U.S. perform masculinity differently in Armenian than they do in English, and recounted it to him. We talked about that, and he spoke to me about Mahsa Amini’s murder by police and the long Iranian tradition of cutting one’s hair in mourning. He told me what he finds most important are the stories of women that need to be uplifted in historical record, and recounted the story of falling in love with his wife within twenty minutes of meeting her.
When he dropped me off he said: “From the bottom of my heart I am so happy, because I love history.”
Sometimes the mistruth is a way to preserve a moment of peace for yourself. Sometimes it can come back to haunt you if you’re revealed, or produce a lingering guilt. But sometimes, it creates space for a different kind of exchange, producing connections that nourish us in ways we didn’t expect. Sometimes it can be what you need to be a person first, and your work secondary to that personhood.
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My book Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work is available via Afterlife Press.
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Trying not to cry on transit while reading this, what a lovely interaction. This makes me think that my reply to "what do you do?" will simply be what interests me from now on - "Oh I like pottery!". Just completely segue the conversation into something I want to talk about haha.