Sorcerers of the Skin

(Note: This is an essay the author wrote for a class while learning to engage in what anthropologists call “participant observation.”)

I stand up off the tattoo chair and walk towards the full-length mirror placed on a wall specifically for this purpose.

This is an excerpt from one of my longest stays at a tattoo shop in northern Utah in which an apprentice took me up on an offer for a last-minute tattoo. Little did I know the treasure trove of an experience this would prove to be. In the coming pages, I will argue that the community of artists inside Sideshow Gallery Tattoo sees artists as more than people paid to do art due to their high valuation of generational knowledge, chosen family, and a deep understanding of their role as arbiters of ritual. I discovered and chose this shop due to a personal connection: one of the artists at this shop is my personal artist. I’ve spent countless hours being tattooed by her, and we met before she was even at this specific shop. At the outset of my research, I was interested in the world of apprenticeship and how tattooing felt like one of the last places where apprentices exist anymore. As the weeks progressed, however, I would find much deeper meaning in what it means to be an artist and how the artists in this shop see themselves as more than business partners or coworkers. To understand these deeper ties, let me introduce you to the immensely helpful concept of “body biographies” which I’ve taken from Sergio González Varela’s piece entitled “Body Biographies: A Study of Apprenticeship and Embodied Experience Among Tattoo Artists in Mexico”. In this piece, Varela explores how bonds between artists are formed as they tattoo each other in the shop. Not only does this serve to glue together relationships, but the tattoos themselves act as outward symbols of the shared experience and transfer of knowledge. (p. 239) Speaking more specifically to the relationship between apprentices and mentors, the entire process of learning tattooing is rich with what I’d call generational knowledge. Returning to my experience of being tattooed by the shop apprentice, we can see the evidence. Not only is the art of tattooing being taught, but knowledge about proper healing, and even recommendations about supplies and equipment are all shared and passed down from “generation” to “generation”. Body biographies are also more than shared experiences between artists because really all tattoos are body biographies. The typical tattoo is deeply symbolic, and even tattoos with no deeper meaning still leave a lasting physical mark representing the experience that created it. Despite the cited study taking place in Mexico, this all holds true regardless of geography, as we see in this excerpt from an in-depth interview I conducted with my artist, Jade. I asked how tattooing/being tattooed by each other compares to tattooing a client:

So “body biographies” are a useful tool in this situation, but these artists don’t define themselves as artists because they tattoo each other, or share knowledge. To understand how they define “artist”, we need to explore how the communal space inside the shop is shaped by such practices. Not only is the emotional space inside the shop shaped by the interactions between artists and clients but also by the actual physical shop itself. I recall one interaction in which I commented on all the creepy and macabre circus and circus-adjacent decorations and knick-knacks. Francesca, the owner of the shop, related back to me how joining the circus had always been a dream of hers so she created one here in the shop. Looking at shop dynamics through the lens of the circus is our next venture. In a stereotypical and idealized scenario, running away to join the circus typically entails leaving behind a bad situation in hopes of carving out a space of acceptance for yourself. This place is a place of circus freaks and other outcasts. It’s also a collection of nomads who, despite the loyal ties they may build, can come and go with the wind. For example, Jade ended up at this shop because of a past apprentice who then left after two weeks for a completely different opportunity. Instances like this may prove more the exception than the rule as we can see in one of my conversations with Francesca where she explained how other shops may be more cutthroat but “We’re not like that, we’re like family.” At first, I was calling this the “circus freak lifestyle”, but I’ve settled on the far more gentle and more explanatory, chosen family. To get a better idea of this cutthroat nature that is absent here we can look once again at my interview with Jade. After asking how one might determine the criteria for graduation, she said this:

This is only one of many stories and interactions that showed me that the artists here see themselves as family. If you still don’t believe me, I’ll have you know they fed me lunch every time I visited. When I asked why I’m always included I was told they typically just bring leftovers and whatnot and share them with everyone. This idea of chosen family allows us to explain the dynamics of the community in the shop while also allowing space for the chaotic nature of the group itself. Anyone is welcome to come and carve a space for themselves so long as they don’t start to get an ego or allow money-making to become a sole priority. The circus doesn’t do well when someone steals the limelight or when someone in the group doesn’t put their heart into the performance. Let’s move on before I get stuck in the analytical weeds.
To shed light on my previous analogy, let me introduce you to some categories that the artists themselves use to help delineate their community. Throughout my conversations, there were many references to ego. These people are called “scratchers”. They’ll take nearly any job because they’re mainly motivated by money. This is in stark contrast to the “tattooers” or real tattoo artists who will be transparent about the whole process (i.e. disclaimers about hand and face tattoos, how the tattoo will age, etc). Your typical “scratcher” might rely more on walk-ins and instant gratification clients to fill their appointment books. In this relationship, well, there hardly is one. Often, the artist (read: scratcher) cares little for the client and their experience. This is where they get their name because they speed through the process and “scratch out” their tattoos. Jade illuminated this point for me during our interview when she commented on how her mood can affect not only her but the other artists and clients as well:

A good artist, a “tattooer”, understands the process as a holistic experience. Not only does this mean they’ll provide realistic expectations for their clients, but they can then set clear boundaries about what they’re not willing to do, and what they don’t feel comfortable putting their name on.
This brings us to finally being able to understand what I mean when I say these artists maintain a role as arbiters of ritual. As a tattooed person, I’m familiar with the entire process of booking, getting, and healing a tattoo. However, I’d never gotten a tattoo while also in the mindset of observing and taking notes. So, I got asking around and before the end of my stay that day I found myself on Jack’s tattoo chair. Now, while Jack is best understood as the “shop apprentice”, again echoing the chosen family dynamic, he also had partial oversight by Jade. This all leads to one of the big insights of this experience:

Sitting in Jack’s chair (and also Jade’s many times in the past) I feel cared about. From start to finish the experience is about me. I can re-situate the stencil until it feels right. I can take a break whenever I need to. However, it takes more than just being emotionally attentive to your client to cross that line into “tattoo artist” territory. Let us return to my tattooing experience:

Here, getting in the zone is more than just a fun cliche for being really focused. Instead, we need to take it quite literally and examine the relationship between what the artist is doing physically, and what’s happening emotionally. In Varela’s piece, we read a lot about ‘lines’ (pp. 237-238). I extend this idea with the added interpretation of ‘boundaries’. I do this to allow the creation of a seamless theoretical bridge between ‘tattoo as art’ and ‘tattoo as ritual’. Furthermore, Varela’s piece establishes this, as do many others, if not also the fact that some cultures regard it literally as ritual. I aim to examine the role of the artist in said ritual. The tattooing process itself is broken up and boundaried into fractal segments of liminality. At times these stages can last indefinitely as Francesca once told me of a client who passed away before ever coming in to finish the piece they had started together. Other times it’s a moment or two that separates the realms as the artist changes inks or takes a smoke break. Emotionally for the client, the experience has boundaries as well, where pain marks the edges of the boundaries, and the anticipation of pain marks others. The tattoo itself is an amalgamation of lines and boundaries that represent the movement through the liminal spaces of ritual. Here too we see the emotional dynamic structure of the chosen family where ‘carving out a space for yourself in the circus’ is a constant fight against the ever-changing world and the boundaries it offers or enforces. Up until now, I’ve avoided using the word shaman. This was intentional and for obvious reasons. However, these artists are learning ritual pain knowledge through the sharing of generational knowledge. Varela, and my conversations in the shop, agree that “self-taught” tattooing has its limits. To be an artist one must learn to walk through the liminal emotional spaces of reclamation and transformation. Varela says “[I]t is worth mentioning that most, if not all, tattoo artists have tattoos themselves made with a different array of fellow artists and friends. Their bodies become biographies and like with their clients, they transform their bodies into vast canvases for experimentation, where reciprocal links are constructed in what they argue is the karma they pay for being tattoo artists themselves. They ink others, but they need to be inked and experience the pain, too.” (p. 239) It’s not just the pain of the tattoos the artist experiences that links them to their clients, though. As a tattooed person myself, social ostracism isn’t extreme, and in a lot of ways, it’s akin to being a circus freak. People only want to acknowledge you to ogle at you. Taking it one step further, I’d argue that quite a lot of tattooed people face the feeling of exclusion before the tattoos, and the tattoos are a reclamation of that. Quoting Varela, “. . .tattoo artists. . . heal . . .persons through tattoos, covering scars, signifying important moments of their lives, and marking, sometimes forever, a memory in time through pain.” (p. 233) When someone gets a name tattooed, it’s not just because they like that name, right? It’s the name of a friend, or a family member, or a life partner. When people get numbers, it’s more than just ‘I like the number one thousand nine hundred ninety-seven’. Rather, it’s because 1997 is a birth year. This holds true for tattoos without any deeper meaning as well. In fact, tattoos for the sake of getting a tattoo or ‘because I like it’ is exactly the data point we need in order to understand the wider mechanism at play here. It’s easy enough to stay at the surface and say people get tattoos because they find them appealing or because they enjoy the experience, that it’s all a personal/private experience. However, when we dig deeper we can see that every act of tattooing is (intentional or not) a wider signal to outside society. This is simply because tattoos have a stigma. Either tattoos have anti-colonial, non-western stigma stemming from those aforementioned deep cultural roots, or they have connections to the criminal underground, and its anti-authoritarian moods and paradigms. No matter how you spin it, society has norms about tattoos and the people who have them. In short, society is held together by unspoken rules of normativity. Tattooing breaks those norms in a highly visible way, and this makes people uncomfortable. One can call it ‘neo-ritual’, but the corresponding ‘neo-shamans’ is clunky and inappropriate. Besides that, we begin to lose sight of just how thoroughly these artists ‘walk between worlds’. Suffice it to call them sorcerers for now, and let me explain why. In a piece entitled “Jabes amongst Songhay Sorcerers”, Paul Stoller takes us on a “walk” throughout the piece as he introduces “Jabes” (the philosophical works of Jabes) to his ethnographic interlocutors, the Songhay sorcerers. Reading it is a fever dream as Stoller treats the interaction of ethnographic data and Jabes’ philosophy as real and concrete interactions between persons. I say he “walks” you through all this because walking is a core theme and analytical tool used by Jabes and Stoller. Just like lines, walking is a physical representation of the move from one space to another: the drawing of boundaries and the crossing of them. The Songhay sorcerers live in these spaces. “To this day, Songhay sorcerers position themselves between the village and the bush. They live in dream spaces that connect the social and spirit worlds.” (p. 321) This is how I came to understand the artists at this tattoo shop. To them, tattooing is far more than simply injecting ink into skin in pretty patterns and shapes (like a “scratcher”, for instance). For the artists here, tattooing is a ritual of reclamation. A ritual that can only be learned through the inheritance and practice of generational knowledge. Although this ritual can bind people and create a relationship between artist and client, it also serves to create bonds between artists that transcend all other boundaries like shops or years of experience, etc. “For them walking became a dream-like state that evoked. . .the logic-defying and sorcerous imponderables of life-in-the-world, imponderables that cannot be reduced to the bloodless prose of academic discourse.” (p. 322) When they tattoo someone these artists are traversing transformative liminal spaces. The majority of people getting tattoos are looking to signal some deeper change that has already occurred in their lives. Clients come in with ‘imponderables’ that can only ever be expressed, understood, and reclaimed through the transformative art that is tattooing. My aim throughout this essay has been to examine the ways this binding ritual can affect the space within the tattoo shop itself. I then analyzed that dynamic through the lens of chosen family. Lastly, I explored the ritual role of tattoo artists and what it looks like when the artist loses sight of that. To the artists I spent time with, understanding this role is what makes an artist an artist as it allows them to offer a holistic tattooing experience as opposed to simply having ink scratched into your skin by a stranger. I’m deeply grateful for my time with them and the memories they imprinted in my skin and on my mind, and I’ll never be the same because of it.