A 10-year-old got a tattoo; his mother was arrested

Last month, a 10-year-old boy walked into the nurse’s office of his elementary school in Highland, New York, and asked for some Vaseline. He wanted to rub it onto his new tattoo — a crude rendering of his name in large block letters on the inside of his forearm.

The nurse called police. The boy had gotten the tattoo with his mother’s permission from a neighbor, according to local authorities. While some states have no minimum age for receiving a tattoo if a parent allows it, New York state forbids anyone younger than 18 from getting tattooed with or without parental consent. Last month, both the tattoo artist, Austin Smith, 20, who was unlicensed, and the boy’s mother, Crystal Thomas, 33, were arrested, as pictures of the boy’s arm stirred outrage across local and international news sites and social media.

Yet, as societal mores around tattooing shift — nearly half of all millennials have tattoos, compared with only 13% of the boomer generation, according to a 2015 survey by the Harris Poll — there is a wide spectrum of responses to tattoos on young people. There is no federal minimum age for tattoos, and state laws vary widely. Some mirror New York’s strict over-18 rules. Some permit tattooing with parental consent for people as young as 14 years old. About a dozen, including Ohio, West Virginia and Vermont, allow it with parental blessing and do not specify any minimum age.

It is a situation that Dr. Cora Bruener, a pediatrician and professor at the University of Washington Medical Center’s Seattle Children’s Hospital, and author of guidance on tattoos for pediatricians, issued by the American Academy of Pediatric Medicine, finds troubling.

“It is a permanent mark or a symbol you are putting on your body, and I don’t think kids under 18 have that kind of agency to make a decision,” Bruener said. “We need to look at these laws again.”

The current landscape means that the episode in New York was not unique:

■ In Ohio, a woman named Nikki J. Dickinson posted a video that went viral of her holding her 10-yearold son while he received an at-home tattoo in 2018. She said she had “tired” of the boy begging for one, according to ABC News. (Although Ohio has no minimum age with parental consent, Dickinson was charged with endangering her child, because of unsanitary conditions. She pleaded guilty, according to local reports, and was sentenced to community service.)

■ In North Carolina, an over-18 state, a mother was charged with child endangerment after she tattooed a heart on her 11-year-old daughter’s right shoulder in 2012, according to a local news station. “She asked me to do it,” she said.

■ Two years earlier, a Georgia couple were arrested after they tattooed crosses on six of their children, ages 10 to 17, just like their own tattoos. State law there limits tattoos to people 18 and older. “I’m their mother,” Patty Jo Marsh told The Atlanta Journal-constitution at the time. “Shouldn’t I be able to decide if they get one?” The charges against the couple were dropped, according to court records.

Limiting tattoos to adults is a relatively modern, Western practice, said Lars Krutak, a tattoo anthropologist and research associate at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who has studied tattoo culture in 50 Indigenous tribes across 30 countries. From Japan to Kenya to Borneo, he said, tattoos for children marked life stages, were used as tribal identifiers and were believed to have medicinal or therapeutic purposes.

“Maybe decolonizing the Western thought concept of ‘age-appropriate’ tattoos could be enlightening,” Krutak said. “But I am not saying that children should be tattooed at 10 and 11 years old, because they still have a lot to learn about the world.”

Thomas, the parent in Highland, New York, near Poughkeepsie, described her case as a misunderstanding. She said she favored age limits and that she had mistakenly believed her son was asking for permission to get a temporary tattoo. “No little child should get tattooed,” she said. She has been charged with endangering the welfare of a child.

A few days after Smith, the tattoo artist, was arraigned in Lloyd Justice Court on charges of dealing unlawfully with a child, a misdemeanor that can entail up to a year in prison, he was racked with deep regret over tattooing the 10-year-old.

“It’s the worst mistake I’ve made in my life,” he said. “At the time, I thought if you got your parents’ permission, you could get a tattoo.”

As for Thomas’ son, today he feels differently about Smith’s agreeing to give him a tattoo. “He should have said no,” the boy said.