Decontextualizing ‘Failure’ in Tattooing
Originally posted on Substack October 23, 2024
In my 10 years in the industry- 4 years apprenticing and 6 years actively making a career tattooing- only one year has been financially good to me. This year has truly been the worst in terms of career and financial success, despite being more confident, more seasoned and more skillful in my work than years previous.
This is where my perspective needs doctoring. I’ve done everything in my power to make my tattoo career launch here. I, like everyone else, am a victim of capitalist crimes. People are not getting their needs met and our meager wages are stolen from all of us to commit genocide of the Palestinian people.
How could individuals come up with enough expendable income to have me to do their tattoos? It feels rotten to even discuss the reality of financial sustenance, especially when your work is centered around what is seen to be a luxury, a hedonistic product of consumption.
I need to take a moment here to express my extreme gratitude for the people who decided to get tattooed by me in LA.
Again, we are all suffering, and I have no illusions about getting tattooed being a last priority when we are worried about food, rent, and healthcare.
I’m astounded at the people who have put their trust in me. In Seattle, I had many years of deep relationship with people who were able to recommend me clients. Here in LA, the people who have come to me just decided to trust the process without a community connection, and I’m so grateful for the leap of faith.
I can genuinely say that I am SO proud of the tattoos I have done since I have moved here. The people who have sat down with me have helped me generate hope for my future, as I believe in the health of our collective future.
This tattoo was done on another queer Filipinx person in the film arts here in LA. This was done amidst the Sag-Aftra film industry strikes to demand better working conditions and wages. As I write, the apple gift card they had given me as a tip sits on my desk. I’m touched at the kindness despite mutual industry hardship, in a volatile working world.
I am writing to express my thoughts on how The Tattoo Industry has reacted poorly, to circumstance, inciting blame on others for what ultimately is in the guilty, remorseless hands of capitalism.
Tattooers worldwide are posting extra availabilities (meaning they’re not booked), more illustration offerings (meaning they have way more downtime to draw than usual), and deals (doing cheap tattoos adds up to more income than doing no tattoos).
I’ve been asking for a long time if colleagues worldwide have been slow or successful. It took many months of their incomes humbling them to be able to admit to others that they too are suffering.
This is an industry about saving face while pretending not to care about what others think.
Everyone wants everyone else to think they are doing well.
If our clients knew we were doing poorly, then we wouldn’t have the advantage of scarcity that others with internet fame could lean on.
The false thought is: the less attainable you are, the more desirable. Whats worse is that if our colleagues knew we were doing poorly, then the stink of desperation on our bodies would long outlast this era of hardship.
I knew we were already in the middle beginnings of economic downturn in tattooing. I just got a head start by moving to a new city with no clientele. Other tattooer’s inability to admit to our shared hardship, that they too were struggling, left me feeling isolated. At the time, it was only a few that came around that I could discuss with.
The more we talk about our truths, the easier it will be to come up with collective solutions.
I unsurprisingly have no solutions. However I do think that the medicine for getting through this has to be in collectivity and in solidarity.
Meta’s Threads has become a premiere spot to witness how we all are coping with the changes. Some use it the same they would any other platform, another opportunity for advertisement, though Threads seems unconcerned with supporting artists in this function.
Unsurprisingly, tattoo artists moving to a new platform hasn’t granted any our clients any more expendable income. Threads is just advertising tattoo hot-takes to other tattooers.
On the same platform, you can witness tattoo artists’ self blame: we are not doing enough.
Draw more. Lower your prices. Be a better artist. Be better at marketing. Better. Better. You’re not good enough, they’ll come when you’re good enough.
We all fall victim, some with more frequency than others, to the voice inside us that turns one of capitalism’s many economic crises into yet another individualist issue. On which days will the voice be louder than this truth also being spoken in our heads: that no amount of self betterment will claw us out of this hole?
The Meritocracy we live in is an American mythology.
I wish our myths were more entertaining, like the lore of Greco-Roman ubiquity or the many demons and deities of the Philippines. Does the Meritocracy, the trickster god that it is, have a face? What is the look in its eye when it wraps its teeth around our necks? What fate will the Meritocracy have at the end of its chapter?
Some artists not only experience terror at the face in the mirror, but cannot bear to see the image beyond the face: the background in flames, their belongings being looted by billionaires. For those artists, their solution is scapegoating.
Everyone blames newcomers for over-saturating the industry and taking business from them. They think: there are too many good artists to compete with- or- there are too many “bad” artists who do well for themselves that tattooers love to resent.
Oldheads make profit and reap free labor from their apprentices, and if they don’t immediately turn around to resent them, they resent those other apprentices that never contributed specifically to their gain, but instead financed the third vanity vehicle of some other older tattooer that they have always deemed competition.
Those oldheads love to say that they made us, but in the conversation around the industry’s over-saturation: made us, they did not do.
Newcomers blaming newcomers has been an incredibly interesting phenomenon to me. It seems a false way of shielding themselves from being lumped into the very category they are pointing at.
If you are pointing to someone else, you are diverting attention away from you. It’s not you that’s over-saturating the industry, it’s them. While the attitude is likely easier on the ego, it doesn’t do much to change the size of a wallet.
Some think they are clever by encouraging others to find alternative work. They think: If I encourage you to leave, I will be the one left standing to take clients.
By grit and perseverance, they believe that they are somehow more special than another artist. If they are one of the ones still standing, they must have earned it by hard work. The lessons shared at the onset of Covid and during the George Floyd uprisings of 2020 never took with these working artists. They were never able to, and maybe never wanted to, integrate the belief that a set of privileges has contributed greatly to their success. They refuse to believe that there are, by their own standards of quality and sweat, much worthier artists that didn’t get their shot due to issues in equitability.
At the core of these attitudes lies scarcity and competition. There is no belief that there is enough to go around, despite there being an overwhelming acceptance and enthusiasm for tattoos than in previous decades.
Once again, there is no accountability for the material conditions we live in.
It’s so much easier to point to your neighbor bringing home groceries when you’re on your last stale slice of bread.
