The Painful Pleasures of a Tattoo Convention

The venue was the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Duggal Greenhouse, all thirty-five thousand square feet of it. Hillary and Bernie debated here in 2016. The building used to be a boat-assembly plant, which made the festivities oddly apt, since tattoos have always thrived on water: sailors marked themselves and shipped their skins to every latitude, and most of the world’s historic tattoo capitals (San Francisco, Venice, Yokohama, New York) are port cities where a thousand cultures sloshed. During the convention’s opening ceremony, two bagpipers and a drummer marched past rows of stalls, and for a second I wondered if bagpipes might be a tattoo thing. But no: two of the three organizers happened to be Irish.

Ireland may have had tattoos before it had its name. Celtic warriors are thought to have pricked their chests blue, and there is evidence that “Britannia” comes from an ancient word for “covered in paint.” Rename the Brooklyn Navy Yard “Britannia,” then—some of the people here looked like they’d been born in ink, and as they reclined on tables they let artists ink them further. One of them, a bearded guy welcoming a fresh tattoo to the zone behind his left ear, acknowledged my existence with a smile and an upturned thumb. He wasn’t here to get a tattoo, exactly, because none of them were—they could do that anytime. They were here to look at thousands of people like me looking at them. They were here to perform. Not a very taxing performance, you might think, but some of the meatiest roles need little to no stage direction.

The New York Tattoo Convention, three years old and more than three hundred artists strong, is far from the biggest in the country. It is not even the biggest in New York City, and as far as I can tell it has no particular claim to being the coolest or the most respected. As my list of pop-culture characters suggests, men predominated, though most inked Americans are women. In its lack of obvious superlatives, however, the convention may be a sign of why tattoos as an art form are doing great, mostly because they avoid all the usual signs of what it means for an art form to be doing great.

On my first day, I met a middle-aged man named Dave, a loyal customer of Soul Kraft Ink Tattoos, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. His left leg won Best Leg Sleeve at the Baltimore Tattoo Arts Festival, and his left forearm is quilted with the Duomo of Florence, Michelangelo’s David and “The Creation of Adam,” and a starry-nighted Vincent van Gogh. He spoke about Abraham, the artist who put everything in place, with reverent warmth, and for much of the weekend he lay on his side while Abraham decorated his right calf. To my eyes, Dave gave every indication of having done this for decades, but at the beginning of last year he had no tattoos at all. His first, a tiny blue-and-green matryoshka doll, was a girlfriend’s idea, off Pinterest, in the pre-Abraham era. It’s still on his right arm for now, above a half-completed sleeve by a different artist—Dave’s skin has had many suitors, though sheer surface area makes his favorite clear. “Abraham’s my buddy,” he told me. “He calls me up, says, ‘I have an idea, can I put it on you?’ ” There is a large tattoo of a woman’s face on Dave’s leg. When I asked him who she was, he told me he hadn’t a clue.

Abraham is a youngish man with the tattooist’s spooky gift for wordlessly putting strangers at ease. He was born in Venezuela and learned about art from his father, a painter. When I asked about his work, he gave Dave the credit as promptly as Dave passed it back. I noticed a lot of this at the Duggal Greenhouse—plentiful characters but no obvious, off-the-charts assholes. Maybe the organizers have good taste in people, or maybe the tattoo world simply doesn’t attract many megalomaniacs. There is no bloated international market, for one, no Russian plutocrats investing in ink for tax purposes; and our megalomaniac-enabling millennium has so far produced household-name chefs, d.j.s, magicians, and household-organization consultants, but not a single household-name tattoo artist. One struggles to imagine that many people get into tattooing to become famous, or even merely rich, meaning they come for what remains. As I said, great.

This is an art built on oxymoronic coalitions. In “Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art” (Princeton), the historian Matt Lodder recounts the story of George V, who, in 1881, three decades before he became king, returned home from Japan with a dragon tattoo. Most tattooed Europeans at this time were prisoners or sailors, but whispers of the prince’s naughtiness inspired a fad. Kaiser Wilhelm II got a tattoo. So did King Oscar II of Sweden and Winston Churchill’s mother. For a while, ink meant you were either very high or very low, running a country or being run into the ground by it. After the First World War, tattoos were the prized accessories of both flappers and the smart set. In 1970, Time reported that the tattoo was enjoying yet another moment, and today a third of America sports or hides one. Throughout all this, the tattoo has never been strongly associated with any particular era and has therefore never grown dated—in 1897, e.g., the New York World estimated that three out of four society women were tattooed, but no one hears “the Gilded Age” and pictures ink. It is some quiet species of miracle when an art form is never era-defining and never old news, either.