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Photos by West Smith
When I was 18, nothing was cooler than the sci-fi video game Mass Effect. I remember staring at the galaxy map and thinking, “I’ll never not think this is cool.”
Now I’m 31, and my bad Mass Effect tattoos are the first thing anyone notices. I wouldn’t say I regret them, but I am embarrassed anytime someone brings them up.
I called some of my hometown childhood friends who also got tattoos the moment they turned 18 to ask if they regretted them.
“Ya know, I’ve actually been thinking about that a lot lately,” Sweaty Bear told me over FaceTime. “I want to say I don’t regret any of my tattoos, but every time I look down at my arm and see this big Misfits skull, I think about how much I want to cover it up with another tattoo, so I guess that is a regret.”
Well at least I wasn’t alone.
I’ve got four tattoos ranging from “almost okay” to “downright terrible.” With my embarrassment for them growing, I find myself wondering, should I try laser removal? Should I get more tattoos to cover them up? Or should I just lean in and get worse ones on purpose?
That’s the crossroads I’m at. Which is why I went to the Seattle Tattoo Expo last weekend to see how other people deal with their ink regrets, and maybe figure out my next move.
It’s Saturday afternoon at the Seattle Center Convention Center, and the hall is packed wall-to-wall with pop-up booths, filled with tattoo artists from all over the Seattle area, plus fly-ins from all over the country. Every booth has at least one person getting a tattoo in it at any given time. The buzzing of 1,000 tattoo guns tattooing at once created a wall of white noise that was almost deafening.
I’ve never been a bouncer or a bartender, but the person standing next to me at the first booth I stopped at definitely did not look 18, let alone 21. There was something surreal about watching a baby-faced teenager (or maybe just a really hydrated 25-year-old, hard to tell) getting ready to commit to permanent ink.
“I’m 17” he tells me, ”I’m here with my dad looking to find an artist to do my first tattoo when I turn 18 later this year.”
Seeing myself in this kid I ask him, “So what are you planning on getting tattoo’d when you turn 18?”
“Last summer I climbed Mt. Rainer and I want to get something to symbolize my journey,” he said.
Already 100 times more thoughtful than any tattoo I got at 18. Still, I had to ask:
“Think you’ll regret it when you’re older?”
“I’m 17,” he laughed. “So, no.”
I turned to his dad, curious how he felt about his kid browsing tattoos before he could vote. “I just tell him, nothing on the neck or above until you’re old.”
In one booth, a woman had the stencil of a disco ball on the palm of her hand. I’ve always liked hand tattoos but never had the nerve to commit to one.
“What made you decide to get a disco ball tattooed on your palm?” I asked.
“I like music.”
Sometimes it really is that simple.
While walking the show floor, my eye caught a woman lying flat on her back on a tattoo table, staring blankly at the ceiling. The way she was positioned almost made her look like a corpse. She was getting the finishing touches on a neck tattoo. Noticing me hovering, the artist waved me over to take a photo and get a closer look.
The woman didn’t say a word. I figured maybe her throat had temporarily shut down after being stabbed with a needle for hours this afternoon. We all talked over her until finally I asked, “Does it hurt to talk?”
“No, I’m just quiet,” she said.
I had to ask what inspired her to get a neck tattoo that day at the Expo.
“This was kind of spur of the moment,” she replied. “I walked up and thought, if he says he can do it, I’ll do it. If he says he can’t, that’s fine too.”
I wish I lived my life with that kind of freedom, to leave the house in the morning not knowing if I’ll return with a tattoo on my neck. Meanwhile, I’ve had a folder on my desktop labeled “tattoos” for five years and still haven’t pulled the trigger on a single one.
“Do you have any tattoos that you regret?” I ask Tattoo Pizzazz’s Shannon Perry.
“Yes, of course!” she tells me.
“I used to have a tattoo of a lady taking a shit, and a tattoo of a dog taking a shit. Why is everyone taking a shit? I just keep tattooing over them though. I like my tattoos to be a little, what’s the word…mischievous.”
I’m walking the show floor of the Seattle Tattoo Expo when I meet a shirtless man’s eyes. He’s laying on his side getting his ribs tattooed. The tattoo is huge and he is well into the final hours of this piece. He’s swearing and clenching his teeth. He’s clearly in a lot of pain.
“Do you want to squeeze my hand?” I offer.
“Yes!” he shouts instantly. His hand is cold and clammy, gripping all four of my fingers like a vice. Every bone in my fingers pop at once under the pressure, and now I’m clenching my teeth too, trying to act like this doesn’t hurt.
Joseph is two sessions and six hours into a new tattoo. A demonic face that sprawls across the entire left side of his body. This isn’t his first demonic piece, his body is already covered in them, all done by tattoo artist Abel Hernandez who flew in from Honolulu, Hawaii for the Seattle Tattoo Expo.
“What’s the inspiration behind this tattoo you are getting” I ask, part trying to distract him from the pain and part genuinely curious as to what inspires someone to get a demonic face tattoo on their torso. Joseph still seems in pain, barely able to answer.
“Me,” Abel says suddenly, as if speaking for Joseph rather than over him.
There’s an easy connection between them. It’s a bond that comes from countless hours with a needle on your torso. It’s one of those unspoken understandings that reminds you some tattoos are more than just ink.
“Joseph told me he wanted to keep his torso ‘dark’… I knew exactly what he meant, and he let me run with it,” Abel says.
“The hard part is the composition, making it all cohesive and having it flow together.”
“Abel’s done all of my tattoos, except the ones on my hands,” Joseph adds. “I got those while I was in jail, but we’re coming up with a plan to cover them.”
“I abused hard drugs my whole life,” Joseph continues. “It got so bad I went into psychosis for a while, my brain flooded with dark thoughts, I was literally seeing demons. I’ve been clean for a while, but that part of me is still there. I went to Abel and said, ‘I want the most demonic shit you can tattoo on me.’ He just said, ‘Say no more.’”
Joseph’s body tells the story of surviving demons I can barely even imagine. My tattoos tell the story of when I was unemployed and playing Xbox at my Moms house after I should have already moved out. But maybe there’s still a path to turning them into something meaningful.
Outside the convention center, a crowd begins to gather in front of a pop-up stage. It’s time for the Seattle Tattoo Expo’s Worst Tattoo Contest. This year, there’s a record low number of entrants, which, if anything, says that the tattoo industry as a whole is improving … or people are just sick of getting their bad tattoos laughed at on a public stage.
Either way, I’ve been looking forward to this event all weekend.
“This was supposed to be my memorial tattoo after I finished my service in the army,” Josh, the winner of the Seattle Tattoo Expo’s Worst Tattoo Contest says from the stage.
“It took two nights to do and I remember looking at it after the first session and thinking, this doesn’t look good. I don’t know about this. The artist kept saying, “man I am going to fix it and it is going to look great. And well, now this is my tattoo.”
After the contest Josh tells me he is planning on getting this tattoo covered up and he honestly forgets he has it sometimes.
Two things I learned from the Worst Tattoo Contest: Most bad tattoo stories start with, “Well, I was 18,” and end with a price that “seemed like a good deal at the time.”
“Most 18 year olds don’t know who they are yet.” Bryan Kachel, owner of Moonlight Tattoo in Roosevelt tells me. “Most 18 year olds are getting a tattoo for someone else, or to be cool, or to impress someone, or to define who you think you are at 18. When you are 18 years old you are not settled into who you want to be or what direction you are going to go yet.
He laughs, “No disparagement though, I’ve met plenty of 18-year-olds who made good decisions.”
“I would tell people who are thinking about getting their first tattoo, think of your whole body and ask yourself, what’s your vision for it? Think about that instead of chipping away at it with little pieces,” Kachel says. “I think if you bond with your artist, you won’t regret your tattoo and end up covering it up. Imagine if I end up winning a Nobel Peace prize, and you already have a tattoo from me. You would look at that tattoo and think about our bond and how cool it is you have a tattoo from me. On the other side of that, imagine how much i would ruin this tattoo if after 3 sessions right when I am finishing up I say something racist. It would kind of ruin the tattoo for you.”
Bryan’s wisdom really hits me hard. I never thought about the artist’s bond before.I look down at my own poorly done tattoos and ask myself are my tattoos really poorly done or do I just regret getting them done by the former conservative mayor of my one road Alaska town who drives a tank?
Nah, my tattoos are bad, and this guy still sucks too.
So what did I learn at the tattoo convention?
Walking the Expo floor, I realized tattoos aren’t just art, they’re stories. Some tattoos remind people of their past lives, some reflect a serious bond with an artist, and some are just an illustration of a dog taking a shit.
I felt like part of a community. If the most popular way to start a bad tattoo story is to say, “Well I was 18,” I guess I’m happy to be in that club.
I also learned my 18 year old mistakes aren’t as permanent as I grew up thinking. Every artist who saw my tattoo’s said they’d be easy to cover, and I even met someone who had a cover-up done over their cover-up.
“I can tell by the way that you are unsure about what you want to do that you arn’t ready for another tattoo,” Kachel told me on my way out of the Seattle Center Convention Hall. “And that’s alright. It just means you haven’t found an artist that you like so much you want to have their art tattooed on you.”