Get Ready for the Post-Coronavirus Tattoo Boom

“Twenty-twenty was supposed to be the year I finally added more tats to the forearm museum—I'd even sketched out fonts and shapes,” says Brooklyn-based writer Chanel Parks. "It's a bit of a first-world problem," she adds, but "like most people, I'm mourning the loss of my ability to do the things I planned to do. Now I'm like, Fuck, I wanted these tats and I have to wait even longer?”

At least anecdotally, Parks is speaking for a lot of people right now. Like longing from quarantine for a late-spring trip to Italy or a cold martini at a bar, the impulse to get inked seems for a lot of people to be a reminder of how much we used to take for granted in the Before Time. Others are looking forward to permanently commemorating making it to the other side of the coronavirus pandemic. Or maybe it’s just cabin fever. Either way, know that if you have the urge to get a tattoo right now, you’re not alone.

A cruel irony of this situation, of course, is that interest in tattoos is surging even as the parlors and artists behind them are suffering from the coronavirus crisis. Anything that calls for close contact with other people indoors for an extended period is going to be hard to adapt to our new reality, and it’s already a deeply troubled time for the tattoo industry.

“I hate to put it this way, but you're kind of screwed.”

“The tattoo industry has been intensely and doubly affected,” Maxime Plescia-Büchi, founder of the Sang Bleu Tattoo studios in London and Los Angeles, writes in an email. “Because we work with constant physical contact, but maybe more so indirectly because, in spite of tattoos growing mainstream appeal and general integration in society, a lot of tattooists still conduct their businesses as if they were in a sort of parallel world.”

To Plescia-Büchi, who has tattooed the likes of Sophie Turner and [Kanye West], this distance from the mainstream is usually something to celebrate. “Tattooing is that big colorful community where no one will ever get asked what diploma they have,” he says. “You have eyes, you have hands, you have needles and ink, you can be a tattooist.” But for this very same reason, he adds, “unlike any other industry, it doesn’t have any structure where a talented individual would be ‘taken care of’ or managed by another entity focused more specifically on finances, marketing, etc.”

This lack of structure has had its advantages but can bring problems in a crisis. “Artists and studios have little to no back-up plan, and try to avoid a lot of the simple basics that allow individuals to get some sort of support from the system (with huge differences between countries, of course) when things do get bad,” he says. “Most artists and studios saw their revenue stream come to a complete halt, with little to no access to the help available through government channels.”

Tattooers who are just starting their careers and lack established clientele are finding themselves especially hard hit by the pandemic.

“I hate to put it this way, but you're kind of screwed,” says Nathan Kostechko, cofounder of the art collective Heavens. “You're putting all your energy, effort, and everything in your life into becoming a good tattooer. You're already sacrificing. Maybe you're doing special tattoo projects for a cheaper price or every bit of money you make, you're putting back into your craft so you're not really saving. You're investing into your future as a tattooer. So when something like [a pandemic] comes up, you're not prepared and you don't have anything to fall back on.”

Kostechko, a popular tattooer based in Los Angeles, says before the pandemic he had deposits for appointments booked through August. He says there’s a possibility that he’ll have to return those.

“We're being forced to not work when we're not considered an essential business, but paying your bills is essential,” says Kostechko. “How are you supposed to do that if you aren't making money? I probably shouldn't throw people under the bus, but I like to be honest—there are people that are tattooing [right now] because they have to make money and they gotta pay the bills.”

“There's a lot of fear about what going back to work will look like.”

Even when shops do reopen, says Tamara Santibañez, a tattooer at Saved Tattoo in Brooklyn, they will likely be operating differently. “I assume we won’t be able to tattoo at the same rate that we did before, with multiple people a day,” she says. Most tattooists work at shops that take walk-ins or rely on foot traffic, she says, which could be difficult to square with new precautionary measures. Santibañez suspects that shops like Saved will be scaling back and tattooing by appointment only, at least at first.

“There's a lot of fear about what going back to work will look like,” says Zac Scheinbaum, a San Francisco–based artist. “What's it going to take for [tattooers] to feel safe to be able to go back to work and make a living?”

Yet Scheinbaum sees the pandemic changing the way tattooers work in the long run, for the better. For artists like him, the virus has revealed the pressure many feel to “just be a workhorse and produce as much work as possible.”

“This is a huge eye opener for a lot of us,” says Scheinbaum, who has worked 10-hour shifts. “I’ve talked to people who are successful tattooers, and they’ve been like, ‘You know what? I might work two days less when I go back and see how that goes.’ ”

“People are really hungry to get tattoos right now.”

If you’re looking to support tattooers during this time, get in touch. GQ has advocated paying for haircuts in advance or sending your barber a "tip" when you cut your own hair, and the same logic applies here. It’s never too soon to start working together to plan that post-pandemic design. Artists are also finding ways to supplement their income by accepting commissions, publishing books, and selling prints, paintings, and clothing featuring their designs.

“See what they're making and what they're working on,” says Kostechko. “Let them know what your budget is—everybody is willing to work with each other.” If you're not in a position to be spending money, a little promotion of an artist’s work can go a long way. “If you have a platform on social media and you don't mind sharing that person's work with your community, then do it.”

“Creatives are capable of so many things,” he adds. “Just because you tattoo doesn't mean that's the only thing you can do.”

Plescia-Büchi echoes this sentiment. “I do believe a lot of people have experimented and found new ways to monetize their artistic skills or developed their ability to promote themselves,” he says. “Hopefully, this will increase and expand the business-savviness of the industry as a whole and, in turn, help the tattoo industry open up to a better integration in mainstream culture and the economy.”

Regardless of when shops begin to reopen and how the tattoo community will adapt, Kostechko is optimistic about the industry’s future in a post-pandemic world and believes people will come out in “full steam.”

“People are really hungry to get tattoos right now,” he says. “They want to commemorate what they’re going through. There's a weird magic to tattoos that bring people happiness. It's unexplainable.”

GQ grooming columnist Phillip Picardi on everything you need to know before (and after) getting inked. 

Originally Appeared on GQ