The Other End of the Needle

DAVID C. LANE is an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Criminal Justice Sciences at Illinois State University in Normal.
 

Introduction: Tattooing for Beginners

Madison, a first-year college student, sits in the front room of a tattoo shop; she’s decided to get a tattoo today. As machines buzz in the back of the shop, she looks nervous while waiting for the tattooist, Kevin, to finish drawing a design for her. She is successful in school and possesses excellent relationships with her family, friends, and coworkers. Like some of her peers she has decided to get a small tattoo on the top of her foot. The design she has chosen is a small lily, and for her, it is not just a tattoo, but a symbolic mark in remembrance of her late grandmother. Once finished, she will join the more than 40% of those aged 18-25 who have at least one tattoo in the United States.[1]

While Madison is waiting for her drawing, Kevin is making a series of decisions that will affect the outcome of the tattoo. He considers the location—the foot, which has relatively thin skin—and considers how to design the flower in a way that will fit the foot. He worries that Madison will not like the design and request another drawing, requiring more of his time. He decides it best to keep the flower within the conventional expectations of what most customers’ request. He assumes that Madison is like many other college students, and just wants a small tattoo to show that she dabbled in deviance while in college, and that too much variation might deter her. Finished with his drawing, he moves to the front of the tattoo shop to show Madison. She finds it beautiful, and Kevin invites her beyond the dummy rail and back to his tattoo booth.[2]

With the smell of green soap lingering in the air, Kevin applies a thermal fax outline to Madison’s foot and tries to ensure that it fits. He is worried about the angle of the flower, how it flows, and if it looks right on her body. The first attempt to apply the outline looks good, but Kevin is unsatisfied. He rotates it slightly, almost unnoticeable to the untrained eye, and reapplies it in a position that seems to fit Madison’s foot a little better. She approves, and he begins to assemble the materials needed to apply the tattoo. He pulls out the first needle he will use, it is a 5RL (short for 5 round liner), and he places it, still in its pre-sterilized, blister package, on the table. He chooses to outline using one of the coil machines his late mentor left him. Later, when he shades and colors the tattoo, he will use the rotary machine he has been bragging about for the past couple of months. Then, Kevin puts heaving dollop of petroleum jelly on the table. He spreads a tiny amount of it across his workspace. In the spread petroleum jelly, he places several small, plastic cups, 12mm in diameter and about a half inch tall. Then, Kevin takes three different bottles of ink, each pigmented black, green, and purple, and squeezes several drops from each into the separate cups. 

For a moment he pauses, and says, “You wanted the flower part blue, right?” Madison confirms this. Kevin’s eyes begin to dart between several different bottles containing hues of blue ink. He wonders whether the blue ink he just purchased a couple of months ago from an older tattooist at a convention would work for this, or if he should stick with the blue he has been using for the past year. It would be the time to test out that new blue as foot tattoos are not always visible to others. However, he starts to think she is probably not coming back for another tattoo. If she does not come back, he will not be able to evaluate how the ink looks in several months or years. He selects the older blue that he is confident with using. 

After taking the needle out of its package, and putting it in the machine, Kevin presses his foot down on the switch that provides power. ‘BZZZZZZZZZ,’ the machine whirs for a split second. Kevin turns a knob up on his power supply, hits the foot switch, and the machine buzzes for a few brief seconds. Unsatisfied, Kevin turns the knob again. He holds the machine close to his ear and pushes down on the foot switch. Blankly staring at the floor, he concentrates on the sound of the machine and how it feels in his hand. He adjusts the knob again, this time only moving it slightly. The machine’s vibrations barely change, but Kevin notices a major difference. 

The entire time Kevin was assembling these materials he was talking to Madison. He was doing this to gain her trust. A comfortable client is ideal. The more rapport they develop the easier the tattoo will be to produce. “Are you ready?” he finally asks, before starting the tattoo. Madison nervously nods, not knowing what to expect or how painful it may be. Kevin senses this tension and tries to increase rapport by cracking a foot fetish joke. Previously he told me that tattooing feet is one of the most socially awkward and uncomfortable places to be touching someone’s body—especially someone you do not know. Kevin was relieved when she laughed, otherwise this quick small tattoo was going to seem like a long and demanding tattoo to complete. Throughout the application of the tattoo Kevin continues to talk Madison up, by asking questions and telling entertaining stories. This tattoo seemed to pass by more quickly than the others that day. Soon enough, Kevin was asking for one final picture—documenting what he produced—before he bandaged this fresh tattoo, and Madison walked out the door with some care instructions. 

Each day, clients walk into one of the over 10,000 tattoo shops that currently exist in the United States. Like Madison, some are getting their first tattoo, while others may be working on larger tattoos, such as a sleeve or bodysuit. In seeking out an expert to apply the tattoo, someone like Madison must enter the social world of tattooing—Kevin’s world. It is a world that exists in the margins of formal institutions. It has its own cultural code with its members carrying out practices, holding sets of beliefs, and sustaining values. Every day, tattooists like Kevin must not only apply tattoos to people, but also navigate the complex cultural matrix that is the social world of tattooing. 

For example, for Kevin to create Madison’s tattoo, he had to acquire the necessary materials. This seems relatively simple. However, the materials for this kind of activity are not readily available. Kevin needs pigment, and a tool—or machine—that will push that pigment into the skin. Most stores do not carry these kinds of items on their shelves. Tattooists rely on contacts within their world for these supplies. Tattooists cultivate these contacts as they earn the right to become full-fledged members of the occupation.

In producing this single tattoo, Kevin was concerned with the kinds of feedback he would receive. Many others can see a single tattoo, and their reactions can have complex effects on Kevin’s career. On the one hand, he was concerned with Madison’s reaction, and the reactions of her immediate friends and family members. To attain her business, she needed to be pleased with a drawing of the tentative tattoo. Typically, word of mouth refers tattooists to potential clients. Kevin was also considering the reactions from Madison’s friends and family. Their reactions could hurt or help Kevin’s reputation among potential and current clients. 

On the other hand, Kevin was also worried about how his colleagues would interpret the tattoo. Tattooists, like those responsible for producing other types of cultural goods, need evaluation and feedback to perfect their craft. Recall Kevin’s decision to use the old blue instead of the one he recently purchased. He felt that Madison would not be a repeat customer. Without seeing new blue several months later Kevin could not evaluate its effectiveness. The only evaluation of the tattoo he received was from the photograph, which he would show some colleagues. The kinds of feedback received confirm Kevin’s own identity within this world, his status among colleagues, and help him to develop his craft.

Kevin, like other tattooists, needs a space where he can produce tattoos. This space facilitates Kevin and Madison encountering one another. Tattooists tend to band together into a small work groups to operate studios. In the studio where Kevin and Madison met, there were two other tattooists working. This small work group formed through personal contacts and experience. Often tattooists with similar degrees of experience, beliefs, and values work together. 

Researchers have given this world little attention. To date, most research examines tattooed people or their assumed deviancy. These studies emphasize the meaning of tattoos, or the outcome of a social process. By focusing on the outcome, research has largely ignored the world of the tattooist. This research is about understanding, as closely as possible, the world tattooists live within. It moves beyond tattoos and their meanings to understand the other end of the needle. 

Tattooing has several interesting features to study. First, tattooists and tattoo workers create and sustain their social world. To the casual observer or outsider, tattooing might appear disorganized with deviants, criminals, or other social outcasts. However, to the insider, it has a flexible, decentralized, craft-like form of organization, with a code of ethics based on tradition. This code defines the division of labor, reward systems, methods of socialization, and rules of the game. It also helps tattooists manage tensions of continuity and change. Remarkably, with no centralized bodies of socialization, unionization, formal organizations or institutions, members of the tattoo occupation tend to coalesce on a set of core practices, ideas, and values.

Second, tattooing is currently popular and a growing occupation. To put the size of this occupation into perspective there were 9,434 tattoo shops in the United States in 2010. That same year, there were approximately 12,700 McDonald’s restaurants and 12,800 Starbucks. By 2014 there were 10,873 tattoos shops in the United States, an increase of 15.25% in just a four-year period, or an average of 359 more tattoo shops opening each year. None of these are chain businesses.[3] Even though the size and scope of the occupation have recently changed, tattooists have maintained their independence and small-scale form of social organization.
Third, tattooing contributes to our understanding of work and occupations. Studies have focused on complex organizations, the cultures that develop in them, and how professions sustain their positions of prestige.[4] Studies that examine labor in other spheres are often ethnographies about workers in positions of disadvantage and who lack power.[5]Tattooing represents the middle ground between these two orientations. Data show that 99% of tattoo shops have less than 11 employees, and 90% have 5 or fewer employees. Tattooing has not evolved like other for-profit industries that became bureaucratized. Instead, tattooists rely on their decentralized form of organization, which values local, authentic, craft production.

What We Know about Tattooing
Except for a few works, most research focuses on the tattoo or the tattooed person. It examines the types of people tattooed, their motivations, or meanings associated with tattoos. Early research rooted tattoos in pathology, herd behavior, or the fascination with uncivilized other.[6] Recent scholarship has been more pro-tattoo, attempting to remove tattooing from its deviant past, but it still focuses on the meanings people assign to tattoos.[7] Collectively, research has overemphasized the outcome of a social process, the tattoo.[8]

By focusing on tattoos’ meanings studies have missed the mark. They overemphasize how people make sense of tattoos or consume them. However, tattoos, just like any other form of culture, are an active social process.[9] They are not something that people just consume. Instead, people produce, then distribute, and finally, consume tattoos. This book flips the lens to the other end of the needle examining the processes preceding the consumption of tattoos.

Existing literature on tattooing fits under one of four general themes: tattooed individuals and their social psychology; group behavior; capitalism and commodification; and tattooing as a medium of art. Most research consists of ethnographic and anthropological fieldwork, although there are some recent statistical studies in psychology and business marketing.[10] These studies provide detailed accounts of people’s tattoos and their meanings, including the identities of tattooed people. Remarkably, there are relatively few studies focused on the activity of tattooing. 

Tattooed Individuals and Social Psychology
The majority of research on tattooing examines the social psychology of the tattoo wearer. Early psychological research tended to focus on tattooing as a sign of pathology. Later efforts reinforced the association between the presence of tattoos and someone’s mental illness, deviance, or criminality.[11] Some recent works attempt to uncover the motives why people get tattooed, concluding that tattoos are a form self-expression written on the body.[12] Overall, psychological research consistently overemphasizes the connections between tattooed people and other types of problematic or deviant behavior.

Sociological research has focused more on the meanings people assign to tattoos.[13] Studies often emphasize how tattoos have symbolic meaning, tell a story about the wearer’s identity, or allow people to create identities.[14] This includes tattoos as a marker of a deviant identity.[15] Both early and contemporary efforts explained how wearers learn to manage the tattooed self across social settings, including managing a stigmatized identity.[16] Importantly, sociologists found those who become tattooed engage in pro-social interaction in the process of attaining a tattoo, and then learn to navigate the identity of being tattooed.[17] Concerning this process, scholars examined the decision-making process of tattoo wearers vividly depicting how they understand the size, placement, and visibility of tattoos.[18] For others, tattoos helped them create resistant identities.[19] From this perspective, the body is a contested site of politics, and becoming tattooed is a way to reclaim ownership over it. 

Group Behavior. A second set of research focuses on how tattooing and tattoos reinforce group boundaries and social positions. Historically, dominant groups used tattoos to mark outsiders, such as criminals, the socially undesirable (slaves), and various others (religious figures, ethnic groups, and so on) perceived to be threats.[20] They were markers of group boundaries by creating stigmatized bodies and identities. However, there is evidence that some outsiders adopted their stigmatizing marks as symbols of their own resistance.[21] For example, the intention of tattooing prisoners was to stigmatize the wearer. However, some prisoners attained elaborate designs by covering the initial mark(s).[22]

A second way people used tattoos was to demonstrate loyalty, devotion, or allegiance to an in-group. Tattoos continue to be used to denote membership in families, subcultures, gangs, the military, country, and religion.[23] There is a long history of familial, military, and subcultural tattooing.[24] These tattoos are symbolic representations of a person’s membership in a group, rather than casting someone as an outsider.[25] This strand of research emphasizes how members of groups use tattoos as representations to denote social boundaries of their in-group.

Finally, research has demonstrated that members of some status groups, adopted tattooing to reinforce their own social position. In particular, this involves the middle-classes appropriating tattoo wearing from its working-class roots throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.[26] In this perspective, members of the middle-classes legitimate their tattoos by tying them to conventional motives, beliefs, and values of the middle-classes.[27] This is a type of status politics, reinforcing the boundary between the middle-classes and the lower- and working-classes through the consumption of tattoos.[28]

Consumption and Commodification: A Peculiar Good
A small set of research examines tattoos as a consumer commodity.[29] Sociologist, Mary Kosut claims tattoo consumption is an ironic fad, since the current enthusiasm for them seems to resemble the classic fads curve.[30] However, tattoos are not easily discarded once the enthusiasm wears off like other fads, such as hula hoops or streaking.[31] Some even argue that tattoos cannot be a fad, because of their permanence, a quality not associated with fads.[32]

Additionally, tattoos are distinct from other products of consumption in capitalism.[33] Each tattoo produced, is one of a kind, no matter how many times a tattooist recreates the same image. It is impossible to consume a tattoo without being present during its produced. Tattoos technically have no market value in capitalist systems. This is because once they exist, there is no market for the exchange of tattoos with other commodities. Tattoos are not like many other goods people consume in modern systems.[34]
The Medium of Tattoo. The final way scholars have examined tattooing is as an art form. They depict how boundaries between the institutional art world and tattooing have dissipated.[35] During the latter half of the 20th century, tattooing transitioned from folk craft to a credentialed, artistic, occupation, in the United States. Specifically, trained artists moved into tattooing, creating new aesthetics that appealed consumers with backgrounds in art or formal education.[36] This shift is what researchers and tattoo historians call the Tattoo Renaissance.[37]

The Tattoo Renaissance refers to changes that occurred to the occupation beginning in the late 1950s and continuing through the 1970s. These changes included an increased concern for health and safety, the incorporation of aesthetics from the institutional art world, and more custom tattoo designs. Additionally, more middle- and upper-class consumers became attracted to the practice. Some tattooists even incorporated intellectual and philosophical questions into their work. 

Scholars attempted to explain how the Tattoo Renaissance was responsible for reducing or removing the stigma once associated with the practice.[38] Others emphasized how tattooing had become increasingly accepted as a legitimate art form.[39] In particular, research depicted how tattooing has increasingly become accepted by the conventional institutions of art.[40] In sum, this strand of research described how tattooing ascended from a low-brow form of folk art, to being accepted by legitimate art worlds. Again, these studies focused on how people attach meaning to, or understand, tattoos as cultural forms, which become accepted within the legitimate art world. 

Tattoo Work and the (Lack of) Research. This summary reveals a fundamental problem. Scholars have focused on the study of the tattoo, but not the processes of how the tattoo comes into existence. This is precisely the problem scholars of art and culture have been critical of for many years.[41] Few studies have attempted to examine the work and organization of tattooists. Largely ignored in existing research, are the identities of tattooists, their experiences, and the social forces and processes that affect their lives. Moreover, tattooists are situated in a specific social world where the legal, economic, market, and cultural forces shape their work. By shifting attention to the process, the other end of the needle, this study examines those responsible for making tattoos—the tattooists. 

Tattooists and Their World
Sociologists have long been concerned with the role of work in a person’s life.[42] Making a living as a tattooist has similarities to other forms of work. Tattooists’ share an occupational culture, members are socialized into this work, their identity as tattooist is a significant part of their life, they have systems of hierarchy with established pathways of mobility, labor within legal constraints, and adapt to changes that affect their work. 

Like other occupations, tattooists occupy a social world. The social worlds approach illustrates how people attach meaning to their work, the actions that create social organization, and how workers manage continuity and change.[43]This book is about understanding the social world of tattooists in Baltimore, MD. 

Social Worlds and the Tattooist
The social worlds perspective depicts culture as a collective process. It emphasizes the active social process of creating and sustaining culture.[44] For example, tattooists have sets of meanings to explain their world. When tattooists find meanings useful, they also create a justification or reason for them. Useful meanings and justifications become embedded in their cultural code, which functions to reinforce their world and socialize new members. 

Tattooists, like members of other occupations, have distinct understandings of their work. When a tattooist decides to produce a tattoo, they make this decision with reference to their skill level, method socialization, status among peers, and their position in networks. Tattooists learn this information through participation in this world. This explains why tattooists use certain needles, colors, or commit to building machines. This world is a collectively agreed upon construction, which is larger than any one tattooist. It is not static reality, but one that is fluid, where people negotiate meanings that explain or manage the problems of their labor. Those meanings found useful in confronting the practical problems of their work become part of their cultural codes, whereas people discard the less useful meanings. 
Tattooing is “a specific type of social world”, an art world.[45] Art worlds “consist of all the people whose activities are necessary for the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art. Members of art worlds coordinate the activities by which work is produced by referring to a body of conventional understandings embodied in common practice and frequently used artifacts.”[46] Within tattooing people engage in competitive and cooperative relationships. They negotiate rules, and collaborate to procure, fabricate, or supply tools, equipment, aesthetics, and knowledge. The art worlds perspective emphasizes the networks of people necessary to produce, distribute, and consume tattoos. This process is not something done isolation since it requires the collective activity of many people. 

All art worlds have a division of labor, which defines all the tasks needed to produce works of art and who conducts those tasks.[47] Within the world of tattooing some specialize in fabricating machines, which they sell to other tattooists. Apprentices often carry out grunt work or routine tasks, such as sterilization, sweeping and mopping, taking out the trash, drawing stencils, and scheduling client appointments. Tattooists rely on this division of labor to work efficiently. 

Art worlds also have rules designating what is art, and who is an artist.[48] A similar system operates defining who receives the honorific title of tattooist, and what kinds of work constitute legitimate tattooing. Central to these rules are reward systems that bestow honor, status, or a reputation.[49] Some tattooists win awards for best tattoos, or have their work featured in magazines, videos, or blogs, while others never receive this kind of public attention. Additionally, collectors and tattooists alike designate and debate genres or styles of tattooing, noting which tattooist’s work quintessentially represents these categories. 

Networks of interdependence are necessary to carry out their work. Similar to other art worlds, tattooists “[work] in the center of a network of cooperating people, all of whose work is essential to the final outcome.”[50] Somewhere, someone is a specialist mixing pigments, another person fabricates machines, and another provides a space to work. The specialist who builds machines is not present when a tattooist uses it. However, the specialist is necessary to produce the tools needed to make a tattoo. The individual tattooist is reliant on this cooperative network for gathering materials, access to jobs, becoming socialized, earning rewards, and receiving feedback on their work. 

When producing tattoos, the decisions made affect the outcome. To navigate these decisions, tattooists have rules of the game. These are “all the decisions that must be made with respect to works produced.”[51] The rules of the game dictate the bounds of an art world, and limitations of an art form. They are important for ensuring there are sets of cooperative relationships.[52] These rules help tattooists by reducing conflict, determining who needs to do what, how much of it they ought to do, and who they need to do it with. It provides them with an established, but negotiable, way of doing things. 

Key contributions
This research contributes to the production of culture literature in four ways. First, it discusses how tattooists have been able to achieve some degree of independence from other spheres of society. Traditionally, studies tend to focus on those forms of culture produced and distributed by formal organizations, with an emphasis on the ways organizational constraints limit the production and distribution of cultural forms.[53] Occasionally overlooked in the production of culture literature is the concept of autonomy, which occurs when cultural producers retain control over their associations and spaces of work and mechanisms of its distribution.[54] In other words, tattooists rely on a cultural code that protects their autonomy.

Second, it extends our understanding of law to the production of culture literature. Scholarship on the production of culture focuses on law as a constraining force for creative activities.[55] It presumes legal restraints limit agency to produce some cultural forms, while simultaneously providing incentives or opportunities to produce other cultural forms. These constraints shape the decisions of cultural producers, distributors, and consumers. Chapter Four merges the concept of legal consciousness with the production of culture literature.[56] By merging these perspectives it enables us to examine the imprint of law on cultural producers. As evidenced, law is not simply a constraining force structing the work of tattooists, but also a game played by its users, and a resource deployed to protect interests. This provides a distinct contribution about how cultural producers and members of creative industries enact their legal consciousness to achieve goals. 

Third, this research extends our understanding of tattooing by using the framework of the social world.[57] Using this framework I examined the cultural production of tattooing as an active social process. This enabled me to show how the culture of tattooing was more complex than the high/low dualisms established in previous research.[58] These dualisms favored a social class as the explanation for divisions within the world of tattooing. They also overemphasized the meanings people create around their tattoos, or the consumption and interpretation of tattoos. By doing so, they ignored that social class may only be a determinant of how consumers, or cultural receivers assign meanings to tattoos. Examining the social processes preceding the existence of a tattoo reveals the complex world of tattoo labor.

Summary
This introduction began with Kevin creating a tattoo for Madison. He was making decisions that would affect the outcome of his labor—the tattoo on Madison’s foot. Kevin’s makes decisions with reference to his social world, the world of tattooing. His orientation toward work, where he works, training, status, and identity within the world of tattooing contributed toward his decisions. This book is about that world Kevin belongs to. It is a world that scholarship has been hesitant to acknowledge. 

Tattooing shares many similarities with other occupations and forms of cultural production. It has a hierarchy and system of stratification, methods of socialization, careers, and occupational code. While tattooists share these similarities with other forms of labor, they operate outside of formal institutions and without a formal or centralized body of authority. They rely on the code of tattoo work, which is deeply rooted in tradition, to sustain their world. Tattooists favor experience, accomplishment, and honor, over credentialism and formal education. Their traditions operate as an alternative to the mechanisms of organization seen in many other occupations. Tattoo work is a type of resistance to the principles of capitalism and formal rationality. This book explains how tattooists sustain their world. 

Notes to Introduction

List of Figures
Figure 1.1: The Stratified World of Tattooing
Figure 7.1: Authenticity of Machine Ownership
List of Tables
Table 4.1: State and Local Tattoo Bans
Introduction: Tattooing for Beginners
1          The Social World of Tattooing                        
2          Organizing Space       
3          Careers of Tattooists   
4          Legal Consciousness among Workers              
5          Ties to Conventional Institutions and Ideas   
6          Sources of Contention                        
7          External Threats and the Maintenance of Boundaries           
Conclusion: Continuity and Change                          
Methodological Appendix
Acknowledgments 
Notes
References      
Index