The “slowdown” tattooing experienced through 2024, which seems to be coming to a head now, has caused a number of shifts in tattooing’s cultural landscape. Don’t worry; I’m not going to rehash the bleak conversations you’ve beaten to death with your coworkers on zero days. Enough tattooers are already offering incredibly insightful commentary on how shit’s expensive and people are broke. I do want to use this medium to address the ever-morphing trends in virtue signaling among tattooers, the most recent being that everyone from shaky-fang-skull fashion punks to Corday-trad wieners has glommed onto a “man of the people” persona. Suddenly, all of these tattooers are interested in regular folks. They want to do fine-line flower outlines and grandma memorial tattoos. I’m sure it’s because of a newfound tenderness toward humanity and has nothing to do with empty appointment books. They’re taking walk-ins now, everybody. What a rare opportunity for you! Cancellation this afternoon, come on down, et cetera.
Well, okay. If everyone is now a street shop tattooer, let’s talk about street shop tattooing. Let’s talk about “real” tattooing, as “real” tattooers describe it. I’m not so interested in the purveyors of washed out rotary pen tattoos desperately trying to advertise walk-ins at their second-floor houseplant studios. I’m so far removed from whatever the fuck that is that it doesn’t really register as worthy of criticism. I’m not interested in the flash-only to whatever-you-want trajectory, either. That’s a survival tactic and we all have to eat. I don’t doubt the passion for tattooing some of those artists have, and if they’ve become less well-fed off of social media, then maybe they’ve learned a valuable lesson about welcoming regular people and accepting work that challenges them.
I’ll be a little clearer, then: this is a critique of the issues I’ve always had with street shop tattooing. This is a warning for those first dipping their toes into walk-ins who feel pressure to adopt the values of tattooers who’ve asserted ownership of walk-in culture for years—those who have proudly claimed the Street Shop Tattooer title as a means of excusing their total lack of artistic style. The “not too good for anything” guys, who pretend they love walk-ins to assert superiority over famous tattooers or private studio tattooers or whoever else they’re seethingly jealous of that week.
The lady doth protest too much, you know? In thirteen years I’ve never worked with a single street shop pseud that actually liked the clientele they served. They brag publicly that they love doing Pinterest designs, but denigrate the customers who ask for these tattoos as soon as they’re out the door. These jerks don’t love walk-ins, they don’t love working with people, and they’d drop street shop tattooing in a second if it meant they could trace backwards Coleman boats all day. But I guess this self-identification gives them a thing, and everyone’s got to have a thing, even those who claim they’re not completely poisoned by social media. And don’t kid yourself, that’s a thing too if you’re using it to sell a flat image of your own nonconformity. The “anti” is defined by and validates the system it opposes; you’re not against Cool-Guy social politics if your entire professional identity rests upon their existence. God forbid life experience renders us too complex to stick shitheaded titles to ourselves and adhere rigidly to them.
Anyway, these street shop fellas have a job to do, just good honest work, and they’re all but marching to their air-conditioned shops with overalls and metal lunch pails to demonstrate that.
I’ve got a lot of issues with blue-collar-cosplay tattooers who treat the job as if they’re digging holes or cleaning toilets (both far more respectable positions). Street shop tattooing should never, ever equate to printing out a design somebody brings in on their phone and patting oneself on the back for doing the “dirty work.” As if there is no joy to be found in working with the ideas of regular people! This practice communicates, baldly, that the customer is too stupid to understand that they could get something more special than a grainy printout of a poorly-conceived tattoo, or even know a good design when they see one. Lazily copying from Google exposes one’s belief that it’s not even worth trying to show the customer an alternative that aligns with their vision, that their expectations don’t deserve to be exceeded.
There’s nothing commendable about this approach. The customer is not an obstacle standing in the way of you and their money, and the speed at which you can take it from them isn’t anything to brag about. The customer is an inextricable part of the process, and should be treated with respect as a collaborator. Adopting a falsely-obliging persona in order to cut down on drawing time is transparent as shit. As is the attitude that it’s somehow snobby to insist upon redrawing common walk-in designs. Offering to do extra work for free, out of care for the client and the craft, gets spun this way precisely because it pokes at the insecurities of posturing bozos, who present their own laziness and greed as virtue.
Most of us who began tattooing prior to 2020 have done our time at shops where a fast-food approach was the expectation–hustle clients out the door as fast as you can so you can squeeze in another. I’ve done so many printout tattoos that I’ll be working to repair my karma for the rest of my career. There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing these; sometimes the customer is adamant that they don’t want the designs changed. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be trying, every single time, to give them a nicer tattoo–regardless of whether they spring for it. I consider that extra drawing time penance for all the times I didn’t try hard enough to do so.
And I don’t mean any of us should be strongarming clients into what we personally want to do. That’s not the point. It’s our job to offer our own best version of the customer’s idea without being pushy or condescending. We shouldn’t need to be. We’re supposed to exceed their expectations. They’re not professional tattooers–we are!–and it’s our job to show everyone what their tattoo could be. Most people walking into a shop for the first time don’t know that they can ask for design help. And this is reinforced by those who tattoo what the customer brings in verbatim without trying to see if they can maybe do something a little nicer. I’ve met people that were heavily tattooed before anyone ever suggested that they didn’t have to bring their own image in. They weren’t against custom tattoos, they’d just encountered a lot of lazy assholes and thought that was how walk-ins work. Very little makes me happier at my job than seeing somebody light up when I tell them I’m going to go draw them a new thing, just for them, just to see if they like it. I feel sorry for tattooers that can’t find fulfillment in this.
I believe the service nature of tattooing is the work’s most interesting and beautiful trait, not an unfortunate side effect of a commercial art career. That said, the artists who choose to work in private studios exclusively tattooing their own flash are, at least, honest about their approach. They do the work they personally believe in. I struggle to see how saying “yes” to every single half-formed idea that walks in the door is truly in the service of the customer, especially when you don’t even like the idea. I don’t understand how so many street shop tattooers earnestly believe they’re superior to those who leave the client out of the creative process when they are doing something far more insidious—refusing to insert themselves as professionals INTO the creative process.
Good stuff