BOLDER & WIDER
Seniors go wild with tattoos and piercings after lockdown
Acting your age is so pre-pandemic.
Seniors are emerging from lockdown with a newfound wild streak and are heading straight to tattoo and piercing parlors to celebrate their freedom. The trend — which shop owners say has blown up this month — seems to be a direct response to the coronavirus hitting old-timers hardest, having taken more than 14,000 seniors’ lives in New York City alone.
The emboldened elders say they’re more inspired than ever to live life with no regrets.
“I thought, ‘What am I waiting for? I want to seize the day,’ ” said Diane Nadler, who got her first tattoo two weeks ago at age 67. “After everything that’s happened, we can either move forward . . . by taking risks and leaps of faith, or we can cling on to the old ways and play it safe.”
Nadler, who’s been holed up in her upstate home since March, said that she “had never even considered” getting inked until she saw a watercolor-style tattoo while surfing the Internet. She got to work searching for a local artist and settled on Georgia Grey, a tattooer at Bang Bang tattoo shop in Soho — the same place frequented by A-listers Rihanna, Justin Bieber and Cara Delevingne.
The psychotherapist, whose primary residence is in Murray Hill, opted for a black mystical Hindu diagram called “sri yantra” — with a splash of watercolor on top — which she chose not because of the meaning, but because of the cool geometric look.
“I decided to get it on the inside of my right forearm, because I don’t necessarily want this to be in everyone’s face,” she said. “I’m doing it more for me than public show.”
And the pain was no problem for the tough-asnails sexagenarian.
“It didn’t hurt at all. Like, what pain?” Nadler said of the Aug. 9 appointment. “I couldn’t be happier that I did it. It brings me joy every time I look at it.”
But she did have a flicker of doubt.
“I asked [the artist], ‘Am I too old for this?’ And she said, ‘No way! The skin is different, but no, not at all!’ ” Nadler recalled.
Plus, the new ink scored her some serious points with her therapy clients.
“I showed it to some of them, and they were like, ‘Wow, you’re a real badass,’ ” she said.
It was the desire for some much-needed excitement that made Upper East Side senior Jenine Dillon get a cartilage piercing in her left ear Tuesday morning.
“You realize how vulnerable we all are, and it became such a scary time,” said Dillon, who confirmed she’s a senior, but would not disclose her age because she’s
Mr. Right.”
“It’s lonely,” she added. Dillon was out for a walk near her apartment in early August when she popped into Rowan Ear Piercing Studio on Third Avenue. After getting two earlobe piercings that day, she decided to come back for the edgy upper-ear hole, too.
“I’m seeing it all over, and I think it looks cute and sexy,” said the single widow, who said the diamond stud makes her feel like “a new me.”
“But if you were to tell me I was going to do this a month ago, I would have said, ‘Oh please, no way.’ ”
Even reaching triple digits didn’t stop an 103-yearold Michigan granny from getting her first tattoo of a frog after spending months isolated in a
“still searching for nursing home.
Hudson Valley Tattoo owner Mike Shishmanian says his shop’s gotten “an influx of older folks” wanting to “give it a shot now, because it’s something they’ve always wanted to do.”
“I have this wonderful woman I started tattooing recently who is 79 years old, and I did a big dragon on her forearm,” he said. “I think having forever to do what you want got taken away from us during the pandemic, and that was an especially big eye-opener for a lot of seniors.”
Now some, like Nadler, are keeping the edge alive: “I’m getting a second tattoo in October,” she said.