San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
BAY AREA PREPARES TO MARK ITS STORIES
Tattoo artists hope customers will still have skin in the game
Jayne Laiprasert got her first tattoo, of a koi fish, when she was a college student. Twentyodd years later, she has 20odd more tattoos: anime, naturethemed, mythological and animal inspired. Says Laiprasert, a lawyer in San Francisco, “I am what they call a collector, I guess, in the industry.”
By spring 2020, she had picked out a new pair of designs — a sun goddess in the form of a wolf on one shoulder and a fox thief stealing the moon on the other — and booked some appointments. Then came the coronavirus, and the wholesale shuttering of the economy. Laiprasert pressed pause on the wolf and the fox, along with everything else.
The Bay Area’s ink industry has been on hiatus since March. Reopening was scheduled for August, but last month, San Francisco and Contra Costa officials accelerated the process, granting permission for tattoo shops to reopen this week. Those plans have been paused again after a recent surge in coronavirus cases. Tattoo artists and their clients expect it will be a long time before the industry returns to normal. Americans have adapted to shun physical contact — and tattooing is, at its core, predicated on touch, as well as needles, pain and a unique trust between client and artist.
Tattoo artistry has rather a renegade reputation. But well before the pandemic, tattoo parlors were strictly regulated, and artists were trained to be vigilant about preventing disease transmission through bodily fluids. Those within the industry say the sector is actually well positioned to resume safely, given that sterilization procedures were already baked into artists’ daily operations. Some tattoo artists were even asked to donate extra protective personal equipment to local hospitals during the shortage in March, says Carol Chen, who goes by the artist name Cache and works at Black Serum Tattoo in San Francisco’s Mission District.
In contrast, many retail and service workers were thrust onto the front lines and have had to adopt new disinfecting protocols on the fly. Citing this discrepancy, a group of local artists, which calls itself the Unified Tattoo and Body Art Shops of San Francisco, pushed the city to allow an accelerated reopening.
“One of the universal rules is that we treat every person as if they were infected,” says Julo Sanabria, a 28yearold tattoo artist with Black & Blue Tattoo who moved to San Francisco from Puerto Rico. “Because at the end, we don’t know.”
San Francisco, in particular, has a storied history of tattooing through hard times. In spite of old taboos — or perhaps because of them — the industry proved durable throughout HIV and HCV epidemics.
“This pandemic won’t stop tattooing,” says Katie Gray, a tattoo artist who graduated with a fine arts degree from the California College of the Arts during the economic crisis in 2009. Neither have “collectors” lost their zeal in quarantine. Shop owner Idexa Stern, of Black & Blue Tattoo, says she’s received hundreds of client inquiries.
Even so, outofwork shop owners and tattoo artists have struggled to stay in business over the past months, facing obstacles to receiving financial aid that is more readily available to the traditional fine arts community.
Tattoo artists are generally independent contractors who don’t get regular paychecks. They pay shop owners for the work space through commissionbased or monthly rent. Owners, in turn, rely on that income to pay their landlords and keep the lights on. Some owners, like Stern, negotiated interim reduced rents and deferred the difference. But this created a mountain of debt Stern could soon face: “Who can sleep at night when they know they’re going to come back to work and already owe tens of thousands of dollars?” she says.
Straddling the lines between surgery, therapy and art, the tattoo industry is difficult for the authorities to categorize. “We’re just kind of this inbetween child,” says Stern. Gray, for instance, applied three times for the San Francisco Artists Relief Fund, but didn’t receive funding and was notified that submissions by certain commercial merchants or vendors wouldn’t be considered. Tattoo artists became eligible for unemployment when benefits expanded to independent contractors in April.
To be sure, tattoo artists pride themselves on existing beyond the societal mainstream, finding freedom outside of neatly drawn lines. But while the spirit of the art might be malleable, the logistics are rigid. Artists can tattoo only in brickandmortar shops, which are inspected by the health department to ensure compliance with safety protocols. Artist licenses, which are mandatory, typically include the address of their workplace and must be updated when this changes. That plus shop owners’ dependence on artists’ rent creates a fascinating codependency, says Sai Li, a local tattoo artist who is opening her own shop this summer.
Some artists have heard murmurs about others who have continued tattooing underground — by traveling to states with looser restrictions, for example, or tattooing in private spaces not inspected by the Department of Health. But the strict rules that govern commercial shops mean that most artists have been at full stop during quarantine.
To get by, Sanabria, of Black & Blue Tattoo, has been selling Risograph prints and stickers full of the vivid colors and whimsical energy that define his work. He’s also been working on a portfolio of new designs with a strange and mysterious tone, he says, to reflect people’s widespread uncertainty about the future. One recent composition features a leopard fighting a snake. Sanabria often depicts natural forces in combat, but also seeks to portray how such tussles represent a sense of harmony.
Shop doors will reopen. When they do it will be with increased safety and sanitization procedures. At Black & Blue, walkins will be eliminated and just one artist will work with a client in each private room, instead of multiple artists. Artists will use face shields and protective eyewear. There will be temperature checks and a screening process to enter the space.
Still, some workers are apprehensive about returning. Sanabria, for one, plans to wait it out. He’s uninsured, and describes his state as “100 percent paranoia.”
The quarantine has also shifted others’ plans: Gray, who had been working at Analog Tattoo Arts Kolectiv, is now in the process of opening a private studio with another tattoo artist. Gray and her colleague each will likely see one client daily, to keep exposure low. She expects to be booked through September.
Even when doors reopen, artists say the public’s comfort with touch and emotional vulnerability will take time to return. People will struggle with the concept of entering somebody else’s space after this collective trauma, says Li. Tattooing is an intensely personal experience, especially for firsttimers, with what she calls “energy exchanges” between artist and client.
Still, some people consider tattooing an antidote to the season’s psychological disruptions. If the pandemic has clarified just how much sits beyond personal control, tattoos can restore a sense of agency, proponents say. It is a deliberate act — of calculated risk, of physical touch, of intimacy.
“I think there’s an urge to engage in a reclamation of our lives,” says Laiprasert. And soon enough, she hopes, the wolf goddess and fox on her shoulders will be the ones “after the great quarantine pandemic of 2020.”
Carly Stern is a freelance writer. Email: culture@sf chronicle.com
Our lives haven’t been the same since the pandemic began. Sheltering in place. Processing the parameters of social distancing. Watching a protest movement raise the volume on demands for change and equality. Through these months, the Culture Desk section has been adapting as well, sharing stories of how the Bay Area has coped and reacted through these unprecedented times.
Well, we’re adapting again.
Starting next Sunday, July 12, the Culture Desk will become the Throughline, a limitedseries project exploring what the Bay Area of the near future could look like after the effects of the pandemic and protests take hold. How could we use this moment to reshape our region for the better?
Each of the next eight weeks will focus on one topic central to our Bay Area existence, from the arts to technology to social experiences, combining to form a greater narrative of what may be on the horizon. The first installment will look at the ways San Francisco could change — from the development of microneighborhoods in the downtown corridor to the idea that bicycles could rule our streets.
It’s going to be different. And that’s what we want: to spark the conversation.
We want you, our readers, to be a part of this project, sharing your questions, concerns or reactions to the Throughline’s proposals and your visions for our collective future. Our final week will collect your thoughts on our changing region, so your voice is also heard.
Get ready, it’s going to be fun.