Some Kind of Permanent

There are two sets of footsteps coming up the stairwell—boots, probably, the snow is starting to melt in earnest outside. Two women—a mother and a daughter, probably—walk into a tattoo shop in Minneapolis. Defying stereotypes, it’s the older woman who wants a tattoo; she isn’t being dragged along by her daughter for some tattoo on a whim. This is premeditated. They’ve thought it through. When the receptionist asks her what she’s looking for, she replies with “I want one of those breast cancer ribbons on the inside of my pointer finger.” From my corner, I can hear her Midwest accent.

The receptionist winces and explains that a lot of the tattooists in the shop don’t like tattooing fingers. They don’t last very long, the receptionist explains. There’s an expectation of permanence connected to tattoos. But they can’t stay vibrant—hold—forever. Depending on how well the tattooed takes care of their skin (through moisturizing, applying sunscreen, and general healthcare), the tattoos can hold for more than fifteen years without any touchups. With regular touchups, the tattoos can last indefinitely.

The shop is on the second floor—right above a coffee shop where the water tastes slightly off. It’s a ten-minute walk from my AirBnB. It’d only take five minutes normally, but the sidewalks are still coated in a heavy layer of ice. The floor in the shop is faux-wood laminate, more grey than brown. The waiting-area chairs aren’t completely comfortable, but they also aren’t all-the-way uncomfortable. The walls are spotted with framed art—the inspirations behind somebody’s body art, maybe. A flash book or two rest on a side table, unopened, undisturbed. I sit in the corner, headphones on but no music playing; it’s easier to hear them this way. The headphones act as a kind of mask, hiding my attention.

A tattoo artist works in the background, I can hear the whirring of his machine. It sounds almost exactly like a sewing machine, just louder, a little bit more intimidating. Or maybe like a swarm of bees. A girl is getting tattooed with her sister. Or maybe her girlfriend. I hear the sound of their voices but not the words. I imagine the one not getting tattooed is offering words of encouragement. I imagine the one getting tattooed wincing at particularly painful strokes of the needles. I’ll be under that machine soon enough.

The mother glances at her daughter, some silent agreement passes between them, and the mom looks back at the receptionist and provides a resolute nod. A nod that would look more natural in some high government office. She points to the outside of her left arm and asks if that placement would be better. The receptionist relaxes slightly—it’s so much easier to work with customers who don’t argue against the advice they’re given. That’s the thing about tattooing and being tattooed, both parties have to trust each other, this ink is about as permanent as things get on the body. The receptionist relaxes and tells the pair that arm tattoos always hold for a lot longer.

There’s something in the act of an ink-dipped needle piercing the upper layers of skin thousands of times per minute that demands longevity. Maybe it’s the physical trauma the body’s put through in the process—people expect something that lasts forever. Logically, most of them know that the tattoos, much like the memories that possibly inspired them, will fade in time. But is art ever truly logical?

When it’s finally my turn—I showed up here on walk-in day, a day dedicated, as the name suggests, to walk-in tattoos (tattoo sessions with no prior consultations or appointments)—I find out that the girl in front of me got a rainbow. The other woman probably is her girlfriend. I tell the artist what I want.

“An owl? From a medieval manuscript?” I can hear the skepticism in his voice. Can’t really blame him, either. It isn’t the usual tattoo fare, if there is a usual tattoo fare. Stereotypes suggest that the usual tattoo fare is things like hearts with the word “mom” inside them. Or maybe tribal armbands. Or maybe a butterfly. Not an owl from a sixteenth-century German “creature book.” But he does it. And, if I might say so myself, he does it well. That’s the thing about tattoo artists—they are, actually, artists. They learn how to make the art fit this skin, they know where these tattoos belong. They know how to distort the stencil to conform to the contortions of the body.

A week later and two thousand miles away, in Seattle, a friend is getting a dead language tattooed on their arm. Hwæt. Old English. It translates to something like “YO, GATHER ROUND.” Usually yelled by storytellers in taverns before they weave their tales. There’s something important here, too. There’s something important in reviving a word from a dead language. Giving it new life. A new canvas. Ellen Bass, in her poem “Indigo” compares the tattooed body to one that has been “marked up like a book, underlin[ed], highlight[ed], writ[ten on] in the margins.” And she’s right. Bass also talks about how tattoos are a kind of reclamation of a body, about how they indicate that someone wanted to live in their body. The margins of my friend’s body has been marked up. They’ve had inscribed on them a word from a language that goes, for the vast majority of the population, unspoken and unread.

I also am getting a dead language tattooed on my arm. Greek. μυθόπλοͷος. Anne Carson translates it to “mythweaver,” Google translates it as “mythological.” I prefer Carson’s. The tattoo artist doesn’t ask what it means. I’m not sure whether this is a good or bad sign. This shop is clean but feels lived-in. There are tapestries and posters and paintings hanging up on the walls, the floor is hardwood, and the shop is in a well-to-do part of town. Heidi, our artist, has tattoos covering most of her visible skin. She has two full sleeves—tattoo coverage of her entire arm with a generally cohesive theme—of floral and steampunk designs and some more floral art on her collarbone. No tattoos above her collarbone, though.

I ask Heidi about the process of becoming a tattoo artist, about how long it takes, what she had to do to get to where she is now, to tattooing two college kids in Seattle. Heidi tells me that she had to apprentice under a more experienced artist. “Took me two years of apprenticing to get licensed.” When I ask her how she became an apprentice, she tells me about how she had to hang around a shop for a while. “I got a bunch of tattoos from this one dude, and then after a while I showed him my drawings and he took me on.” Even here, trust is vital. She had to trust the person teaching her. She had to trust that he knew what he was doing. In turn, he had to trust her. Heidi talks about how she started tattooing on pigs’ skin. “It smells like shit, but it’s the closest we can get to human skin.”

We talk about shifting demographics—both in the shop and out on the streets. Heidi talks about how, in her eleven years tattooing on Capitol Hill, her average client has shifted from drunk barflies to what it is now—two flannel-wearing college-aged kids getting tattoos of dead languages on their arms. “It’s interesting,” Heidi explains, “how much gentrification has changed the area. Good for business, I guess. I just can’t help but feel like we’ve lost something along the way.”

 I understand what she means. On my way to the nearest ATM to grab some cash to pay for my Greek—most tattooists only take cash, easier for tax purposes, I suppose—I look around at the other pedestrians. They're almost all white, primarily college-aged. Part of this makes sense, the shop's just down the road from Seattle University, a Jesuit university in Capitol Hill. That the area's filled with white kids isn't a surprise. But Heidi tells me about how white her customer base is now. I can’t help but acknowledge that I’m complicit in this.

I ask her what she thinks about the trend of Instagram-ready tattoos. She’s not quite sure what I’m talking about until I clarify. “The really small, super intricate ones that go viral online, you know?”

“Ahh, yeah, those.” I can hear the derision in her voice. Heidi goes on to tell me that she really doesn’t like them. “They just don’t last very long, you know?” And she’s right. They really don’t last very long. She says they have to get the tattoos touched up all the time. It’s a constant process with them. The thing Heidi, and I guess most tattoo artists, keeps coming back to is lasting. They all want their art to hold for as long as possible. Even, maybe especially, on skin.

In my college town, I visit a tattoo school—a place where new tattooists are born (or maybe the better word would be created)—to learn more about the process of learning how to tattoo. If, in the process, I get another tattoo, then so be it (and, for the record, I did. A door, this time).

Kristen talks about how she became a tattoo student. Her friend started tattooing straight out of high school while Kristen went to a community college. Kristen eventually got an associate degree in general art, and her friend became a relatively successful tattooist. Her friend’s mom also, apparently, tattoos people for a living. It’s a family thing, with them.

Austin Powers is playing on a tv in the background. We occasionally take breaks to watch, sometimes Kristen quotes the movie. We talk for a minute about stereotypes in tattoo shops, about how a lot of people think that the shops are always super scary and intimidating. I don’t know if I really agree with that, from what I’ve seen. All of the shops I’ve been to have their own little quirks and eccentricities. One waiting room had broken, but quaint, movie theater chairs as the seats. Another had comic book art hanging on the walls. This shop has a life-sized stormtrooper, from Star Wars, in its lobby. It also has Dragonball Z fanart hanging above a tattoo station.

After an extended period of unhappiness and lack of self-fulfillment, Kristen decided to follow in her friend’s footsteps. She started hanging around tattoo shops in her area and was eventually guided to the tattoo shop in my college town. At the tattoo school, students are required to take over two hundred hours of theory-related courses (think, for example, color theory, machine upkeep and maintenance, state laws and guidelines, and courses on how to prevent infection and keep clients safe) and a hundred and fifty hours of practical application, which is where I come in. Kristen’s nearing the end of her time at the school, only a few weeks left at this point. She’s been through about seven months of schooling, four days a week, on top of a full-time job. She’s committed to this. I trust her.

I ask her what drew her to use human skin as her canvas, and she tells me that it’s always been about life for her. That is to say that she likes that the artwork she provides—she calls herself a “tracer,” a vessel for what we, as customers, want done—takes on a new life on someone’s skin. She likes that. She likes how the person can come up with new stories and new significances for each person they show it to. I think I like that, too.

When my dad saw the first of my tattoos, the first thing he asks me is: “is it permanent?”

I stuttered for a moment, and then replied with “I hope so.”