Tattoo Taboo? Redefining Body Art
Lauren Maggio

Houstin Smith prepares a design on carbon copy paper and fills three tiny cups with varying shades of black and gray pigment. The canvas in front of him is bare and smooth, eager to be inscribed for the first time. Smith dips his pen into the center ink cup, leans in and situates himself, ready to begin drawing. But before touching his pen down to start the first line he reminds his canvas to relax and breathe deeply.

Smith, who has been into art his whole life and works at Blue Lotus in Madison, says no other art form compares to tattooing. “No matter how much you paint or sculpt or draw, use acrylics, oils, pastels—anything—there’s nothing else like the technical aspect of it or the form of application. Sometimes it still freaks me out.”

What’s to be afraid of?

“The skin is a living thing, unlike paper. You can’t erase. It’s like a sponge and if you go over it too long or too many times you can tear it up,” said Jesse Siewert, a tattoo artist at Blue Lotus. “It’s a moving, living canvas that’s fragile and will scar if you do something wrong.”

Once associated mainly with sailors, gangsters and criminals, tattooing has now extended to almost every social class. In doing so, the scope and complexity of its art has evolved to meet new client demands.

Though practiced for centuries around the world, a social stigma dogged tattooing in America through most of the 20th century. Health code issues and underage concerns prevented tattoo licensing in Milwaukee County until the mid-‘90s. The disapproval of tattoo clientele had many surrounding areas following suit on the ban for fear that the “rebels” would be drawn from Milwaukee to their communities to get inked.

Bill Hanson was one of the first to break the status quo by opening his shop, Black Dragon Tattoos, in Waukesha. With nearly 30 years of professional experience, Hanson has witnessed the evolution of tattoos from a rebellious statement to a mainstream trend.

“We had a reputation situation that took years and years to overcome. There was a stigma of who had tattoos and why,” Hanson said.

In the '60s and '70s the tattoo scene was still very much underground but was expanding to people without military background or criminal records. Chinese and Japanese-themed art emerged, bringing more color, intensity and symbolism than the all-black sailors’ anchors and line drawings of the past. Hanson said as the '80s dawned, tattoos entered the workplace as professional women, such as nurses and secretaries, requested small, color pieces with intricate designs.

“We artists had to bring the art form up to meet these new standards. The girls wanted things with more art and higher levels of detail,” Hanson said. With raised standards and expectations, tattoo artists had to work more imaginatively, encouraging the advancement of tattooing as an art form.

“It used to be you’d see the shops with flash drawings up on all the walls in three colors. These guys couldn’t really draw, [the tattoos] were really simple and basic,” Siewert said. “Now we look at the tattoos and they look like oil paintings on skin.”

Smith said though the tattooing machine has been the same for 150 years, pigments have become a lot more dynamic.

“That affects the detail you can achieve and they also hold better in the skin. You think of the old sailor who has a tattoo but it becomes all blurry. There has been a lot of progress since that.”

In the same way the artistic quality of tattooing has improved, the social view of tattoo artists has progressed. Thanks to the growing tattoo industry, the presence of popular shows and art programs focusing on tattooing, tattoo artists are no longer confined to the big top.

“One hundred years ago or so tattooists were like sideshows and at circuses; they weren’t considered artists in the least. But now there are people tattooing who are art school grads and they’ve become known as tattoo artists,” Siewert said.

Though art school is an option for getting started, artists Hanson, Siewert, John Kid and Barry Jaeger all said apprenticing is the best way to get into tattooing. Hanson, who opened his shop about 20 years ago, compared a tattoo apprenticeship to how artisans in the middle ages learned their trades. The artists have inherent artistic ability, but learning the intricacies of working on a living canvas is something an artist would have to pick up from a mentor and with practice.

“There are tattoo schools, but it’s best to learn from someone who’s been doing it; to get real-life experience,” Siewert said. He held an apprenticeship for a few years but did not enter the business in the typical fashion.

“My friend was dating a guy who worked at a shop, so I’d bring in drawings I did for my own tattoos. He told me my artwork would convey well as a tattoo. I just sort of came in the door, got a machine and started tattooing,” Siewert said. While Siewert suggests being an apprentice for a year or two before tattooing customers, he feels that there is no right or wrong way to get into the business.

“Doing my first tattoo was probably the scariest experience I’ve had in my whole life,” said Smith. “Someone is letting you permanently adorn their body with something. And it’s something you’ve never done before.”

As an art form, tattooing differs from other forms of expression - both the artist and the client drive the resulting artwork. The client generally provides the subject of the art while the artist enhances it with his personal touch.

“Really anybody in the shop can do anything, but everyone has their own specialties or is inclined to do a certain kind of art,” Siewert said. “Like if someone came in and wanted a cross, everyone could do it for them, but each artist would produce a completely different cross.”

Some customers are more particular with their requests, while others leave the design open to interpretation by the artist. The artist uses discretion to modify the design into the best possible tattoo. Jaeger said he’ll compromise with a client to get a workable design, but if the client won’t take his advice, he won’t do the tattoo. In the end, he said, it’s his product that will be walking around and he wants to be proud of it. Siewert said it’s up to the artist to know what is going to transfer well to skin.

“Some people don’t understand when something is not going to translate well into this medium,” Kid said. “Not everything works for every medium, just like anything else. Designs have to meet certain criteria to be a tattoo.” A common problem is when people ask for tiny tattoos with a lot of detail. The artists have to advise their clients that it will end up looking like a blob once it settles into the skin.

“I’d prefer to tattoo bigger pieces so I can be more creative and more expressive with it than just a little shape,” Siewert said.

Though each artist has his own tattoo niche and partiality for either color, black or gray, they could all agree that tattooing has become much more mainstream since they started. The practice, formerly representative of a rebellious counterculture, is now showing up as a high school graduation present or as the Sunday morning aftermath of a wild college weekend.

Recently, shows like Miami Ink and LA Ink have familiarized the whole nation with the process of tattooing. Jaeger, who works at Black Dragon, said in the last few years he has noticed more 18 to 25-year-old customers come in. Unlike Blue Lotus, Black Dragon is not on a college campus and they had been used to seeing the more traditional “Harley guys” as customers.

Kid, from Blue Lotus, has also noticed more people coming in since the creation of these shows. It may be that the popularization of tattooing through media and celebrities has reduced the amount of personal meaning tattoos can carry and has caused people question their artistic value.

“It’s hard not to take it so personally that some people aren’t so into the art as I am," Kid said, "It’s really a one-on-one situation where you’ll be talking to someone and they don’t understand the art behind it. But I don’t really expect people to, and I think that’s one of the reasons I like it.”

This popularization, and perhaps devaluation, of tattooing and “household” piercings—ears, nose, navel and eyebrow—has led some expressive souls to new forms of body art. Within the past two years, Blue Lotus introduced the practices of branding and scarification. Branding is burning a design into the skin so it will scar. Scarification is the process of cutting a design in the skin, which is then covered with Vaseline and Saran wrap so it can heal in a damp environment, resulting in a more dramatically raised scar.

Branding and scarification are likely to be more painful and subjectively less visually appealing than other forms of body art, but Kid hopes these processes are the next step for people who think tattooing has become too mainstream.

“It definitely takes a certain kind of breed. It’s a more organic modification: your body grows into it. You’re not adding anything like pigment or metal, and some people like that.” Kid listed some other forms of body art on the rise: splitting tongues, implants (placing balls or rings beneath the skin), and even implants under the first layer of the eyeball.

A lot of people might question when to draw the line between body art and voluntary mutilation. Some would even look at these practices and consider them fit for a circus sideshow. To others that’s just the momentary outlook, and in time these practices may well be adopted by the mainstream.

“Everyone’s looking to take the next step and with advancements in technology they can,” Kid said. “Twenty years ago a septum piercing [the part of the nose between the nostrils] would be pretty much unheard of. Now you probably can’t walk down State Street without seeing one.”