Stand out on a corner on Main Street in New Paltz, towards the bottom of the hill, and on any given Saturday in the summertime one can observe the human parade promenading past.
The winter jackets, scarves and pants, cast-off until fall. Replaced now with shorts and skirts, tank tops and bikini combos.
On the naked shoulders, necks, backs, thighs, bellies, calves and feet, try as one might, you can’t not see it. On the hands, on the knuckles, every inch of flesh is fair game. Tattoos have gone mainstream.
At the Inksane Asylum tattoo studio in New Paltz, Tattoo artist Paul O’Donnell, speaks at a fast clip, with an east-Midlands accent while he recalls that he was in his 40’s before he had his hand tattooed.
“And I thought, oh, my God, what am I going to do? I’ll never get a job with a hand tattoo! Then I realized, well, you own a tattoo studio. This is your job. And it’s going well!”
O’Donnell entered the tattooing world at 19-years old. Just scratching around, he says, he built his first tattoo machine out of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle electric toothbrush.
“You glue a needle to a paper clip, bend the paper clip over. Melt a washer. It’s a process,” O’Donnell said. “Every good tattooist should at some point make a jail machine. I believe it’s a right of passage.”
In the 90’s, O’Donnell crossed the Atlantic and arrived in the Hudson Valley.
“I did a couple of mundane jobs – you know, day jobs. And then in 2004, I met Mike Locasio from Ink Inc. And the man’s a legend,” O’Donnell said. “He’s older than God. He knew the Dead Sea when it was just a little river, that’s how old Mike is.”
Originally from Long Island, much younger than God, Locasio turns 60 next month. Articulating his words with the Nassau county accent, he describes himself as an Elmont boy.
“Up by the racetrack,” he clarifies.
For Locasio, formal schooling ended after eighth grade. He got a job hand-painting signs for a grocery store chain and never looked back.
“They changed their signs every week. Produce cards. Window signs. Also I was painting album covers on the back of Levi jackets in that stitched-border frame.”
After working in motorcycle shops, he got into the tattooing game. He tattooed in Oceanside and then, 28 years ago, he opened his own tattoo studio, Ink Inc, on Wall Street in the Stockade district of Kingston.
“Back then,” Locasio says, “mine was the only one in the city.”
From his uptown headquarters, Locasio has had a front row seat to observe the complete and total inversion of the industry.
“It’s exploded. It’s massive,” he says. “It’s a legitimate art form now.”
Apologizing, Locasio dates the normalization of the industry to the TV show Miami Inc.
“Gotta be said,” he says, presenting the supplicating palms of his hands. “When the TV show came out, anybody who had ever had a prior thought in their mind that they would want a tattoo, but that they couldn’t, that was the go-ahead. It became mainstream.”
Metamorphosis, Karma, Body Graffix and Skin City 2 – the internet lists seven other tattoo studios operating in Kingston. Even Port Ewen has had a tattoo studio for some time, tattoo artist Matt Fragner’s Pandora’s Box.
Right up to the decade of its celebrity make-over, among square culture in the United States, tattoos had been long forbidden. Signifiers of degeneracy, immorality, and if not borderline criminality, then criminality in fact. Gang members, white power groups, convicted prisoners and motorcycle outlaws all love tattoos. All men of violence do. And men who want to be seen as violent. Furthermore, any woman with a tattoo was presumed to lead a promiscuous bedroom life. And tattoos, of course, equated to drug use.
O’Donnell laughs appreciatively.
“Sailors, criminals and hookers,” he says.
Habituated to the judgement of the world outside the tattoo parlor door, and then raised in its estimation into something akin to rock stars, the artists and hanger-ons inside a tattoo studio respond clannishly to newcomers, striking an aloof balance between wariness to outsiders and openness to opportunity. When the tattoo chairs are full, barring an artist deep in work, if the bells tinkle above the glass door, everybody turns to look.
Laying on a tattoo chair in Inksane Asylum, with designs running up her legs from ankles to bottom of her short shorts, a customer recalls her father.
“When my sister and I were old enough to get tattoos… My dad always said, keep them at the shirtline, because that’s the generation he grew up in. And then I failed to do that,” she says, smirking. “When I moved out on my own for the first time, I got visible tattoos and from there, I just kind of said, fuck it!”
O’Donnell tilts his head, listening, looking behind my head.
“Do you hear that?”
All I hear is the sound from the long, fluorescent bulbs mounted on the ceiling.
“Aha!” He reaches over, grabs a tattoo machine from his table top and shuts it off.
“It was just sitting there buzzing away.”
O’Donnell’s tattoo machine, a Dragonhawk, is almost noiseless, not like the insistent electric mosquito-buzzing of the old ink guns.
“The old-school machines had electromagnetic coils wired together, which would make and break a circuit every time you stepped on a pedal,” O’Donnell explains. “These are all rotary now,” O’Donnel explains.
In the United States, before the paradigm shift from proscription to popularity, tattoos were received in the only spirit they could be understood under a moldering system of Judeo-Christian mores- as an act of rebellion or open challenge.
Women, once again, had the hardest time. Through a patriarchal lens darkly, the act of drawing tattoos on the female body can be interpreted as transgression, sexual in nature, against someone’s property – the self-determination exercised by women or girls in receiving a tattoo was characterized as submission or surrender.
More threatening still, against the backdrop of awakening sexual autonomy, was the idea that a young woman’s role in receiving a tattoo wasn’t submissive at all. Young woman as willful participant. Young woman as dominant provocateuse. Any of these interpretations gets the patriarchal pulse pounding with excitement. And there is something revealing about a man, unable to grasp that sometimes, getting a tattoo is just getting a tattoo. Of course, sometimes it’s not. But then, more and more frequently now, the tattoo artist is a woman.
38-year-old, Lisa Apatini – no accent to report – says she only started tattooing during the whole-world COVID shutdown.
“I never picked up a tattoo gun until the pandemic, and that’s when I met my partner. He had just started tattooing. And the lockdown and the fear of even stepping outside in the beginning kept us stuck inside the house. We practiced and practiced and practiced on each other, and then I started getting my portfolio together.”
Practice on fake skin. Practice on oranges. Practice on bananas. Practice on mangoes. Practice on pig or goat skin.
“Eventually, my leg became my scratch pad,” Apatini said. Body as palimpsest.
A year into tattooing, she took a job at Ink Inc.
“Although I never committed to it professionally, I’d always been an artist,” Apatini said. “It was a hobby and a passion. I painted, I sketched, I did work with clay, I did all sorts of crafting.”
But the speed of her progression since picking up the machine has been startling. Her career hardly begun, the stars have aligned.
“She just took first place [best neo-traditional tattoo] at the Hudson Valley Tattoo Convention,” Locasio said. “It’s the biggest tattoo convention in the Hudson Valley area.”
Her winning tattoo was a rendering of Ganesha, trunked-overcomer of obstacles, inked in bright colors, serene and wise with a flower at his ear, a jewel set over his third eye, one tusk broken off, a mouse climbing down some wooden beads.
Accompanying the rising tide of new customers, there’s also an increase in the side business of tattoo removal.
“The problem with people having tattoos that they really shouldn’t have, it’s about intention. I think for some people, there may not be very strong decision-making at work and I find that when the intention behind what you’re getting isn’t clear, you might run into problems. And we see that a lot with removal.”
Maybe that edgy ‘Insert Here’ tattoo stamped at the base of the spine isn’t aging so well after all.
“In a nutshell, the body art that you wear is a representation of the different aspects of who you are,” says Apatini. “The facets of your personality, the spectrum of your interests. It’s a visual message that you’re sending.”
And that visual message isn’t all just Mickey Mouse.
Owner of the Swan Song tattoo company, Josh Palmer, formerly apprenticed to O’Donnell, tells a story.
“Recently, I tattooed a girl. She messaged me out of the blue asking if I can tattoo her. She was known to be suicidal. And so I did. And at the end of the tattoo, she said, like, ‘the abyss was calling me, man. I needed something to help me.’ A beautiful thing about this industry is we’ve helped a lot of people through some real dark times. Real, real dark times.”
Palmer credits endorphins and hormones released during the process, and the ritual, which he says revitalizes a lot of people.
“And it’s a temporary vacation. You know, the same mentality of people going to the bar and drinking. Is it healthy? Maybe not. Does it give them a little bit of an escape? Absolutely. It’s the same thing with tattooing. It cheers people up or takes them away from their life problems for a little bit.”
Palmer’s clear, intellectual-sounding delivery seems at odds with his fierce beard and face tattoos. But Palmer is a mix of contradictions. He opened his Saugerties tattoo shop while the pandemic was raging.
“I just, you know, fought the Titan with blade in hand.”
About that dark side: Getting tattooed used to be a reliable way to insult polite society, and because the willingness to transgress is a reliable indicator of an outlaw philosophy, tattoo artists have had more opportunities than most to rub elbows with the criminal class, and, if not to dabble in illicit behavior, then at least to observe it.
“The glorious thing about the tattoo industry is there is no HR,” says Palmer. “The bad thing about the industry is that there is no HR. A lot of tattoo artists focus on other things besides the artistry. Drugs run rampant. So a lot of tattoo artists fall victim to substance abuse.”
But falling into the pit when searching for enlightenment isn’t a problem which haunts only tattoo artists. For most artists, in fact – painters, writers, musicians, actors – intoxicating substances are well understood to be occupational hazards, and anyway there are probably just as many drug addicts – drunks among them – working in offices, rectories and car dealerships as there are getting high in tattoo shops.
The difference is in both the species of substance being abused, which is a signifier of preference and a symbol of class, and the public-facing societal costume preferred.
But beyond that, the real question is to what degree does propensity to addiction transform one into a criminal, because some nights it’s not a tattoo artist who gets woken up passed-out drunk in the cab of his truck, idling his engine at a stop light. Some nights it’s an off-the-clock police officer.
But living is hard and avoiding pain is complicated. Certainly, there’s an uptick in police officers getting tattoos.
“I just had a client today,” Locasio says, “let me know that the Kingston Police Department just hired someone with a neck tattoo.”
So the lines are blurring.
“You know, my son, [Blaise Locasio] has been tattooing for ten years,” Locasio says. “Right out of high school, I taught him. He’s an award winner. He’s up there at King’s Ransom, outside of Troy, working with Thaddeus Katras. He just did a seminar in Ibiza, Spain. He’s going to Chicago to do a guest spot. He’s all over the place. He’s 28 now, but at 20 years old, he said to me, you know what makes a great tattoo artist? And I said, what’s that, son? He says: good mental health.”
That and hygienic tattooing practices. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has much to say on the subject of any activity which, like tattooing and piercing, generates blood.
Like shooting heroin, or receiving a blood transfusion, the pre-eminent risk of getting tattooed is infection by blood-borne pathogens – infectious microorganisms which can be transmitted by contaminated works.
The speed at which a tattoo machine bobs its multiple needle tips up and down is variable, but 50 times a second isn’t unusual, repeatedly puncturing through the top layers of skin in order to insert the ink beneath the surface. And anything else on the needle tips goes under the skin with it. Good hygiene practiced in a tattoo studio – fresh needles, disinfecting the tattoo machine, wearing gloves – is paramount to customers living long and healthy lives.
Untested by the accomplishments and reversals of time, inexperienced in the ways of the world, there are now 18-year-old girls walking the streets with more tattoos inked onto their skin than a tugboat captain has, and done with a quality of artistry brighter and more beautiful than what even the Yakuza are accustomed to. All out in the open. Full sleeves. Hands. Knuckles. Necks. Face tattoos.
“I’ve had a hand tattoo for almost 15 years,” Apatini says. “Yeah. So you know, back when I wanted this, it was a big deal. Most tattoo artists wouldn’t even tattoo a hand.”
Back in New Paltz, like every tattoo artist who can remember the tattoo scene from the last century, O’Donnell too grapples with the double-edged sword of increased financial compensation on the one hand, while on the other having to watch while something which used to lend a sinister and iconic air of exclusivity is groped and embraced by the regularly-washed masses and carried off to corporate conventions and church picnics.
“The one thing that does grip my shit, if you will,” says O’Donnell, “There’s people that go under general anesthetic to get their whole bodies tattooed. It’s a thing now.”
O’Donnell will never offer that service.
“What?! God no. Tattooing is all about the pain,” says O’Donnell. “The ink’s just to prove you did it. It’s like all the rites of passage. It’s supposed to hurt and it’s supposed to leave a fucking mark. Otherwise, what have you done? If tattoos didn’t hurt, then everybody would have them.”
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