The Herald-Palladium, 10/17/2010

The new tattoo generation

Body art not just for teenagers and twenty-somethings anymore

By JEREMY D. BONFIGLIO
H-P Features Writer

It was only a trickle at first: the blood that traveled down Jim Boardman’s arm to his fingertips and onto the floor.

A U.S. Navy buddy had convinced him that he knew something about tattooing, but the blood from the two sewing needles digging out the J in his upper arm said otherwise. By the time his friend got to the I in his three-letter name, blood was streaming from the wound. Boardman was done.

“I was on a Navy submarine for 10 years,” the 67-year-old St. Joseph lawyer says, “and I knew I didn’t need a tattoo that bad.”

It’s been 45 years since that botched attempt and Boardman is now sitting in A Touch of Color II, the St. Joseph tattoo shop owned by J.T. Webster. Boardman unbuttons his dress shirt to reveal a white tiger creeping down his shoulder and onto his chest: the tattoo that took Webster four sessions and nearly 18 hours to complete.

“I always wanted to have a tiger tattoo,” Boardman says, grinning widely. “So I thought why not? When I’m in court no one even knows it’s there. And it’s not like I’m the only attorney in town that has one. I know plenty of 50-year-olds, 60-year-olds who have gotten tattoos. And I think we’re only going to see more older people with them.”

Webster agrees. Since opening his first shop 10 years ago, the tattoo artist has seen a shift in clientele.

“At first it was all just teenagers,” Webster says. “Then I started seeing more and more women from 25 to 45 coming in. In recent years it’s been a little crazy how much older the clientele has become. I’m seeing a lot more people who are over 45 from all walks of life. There are many more CEOs and doctors around town that have tattoos than you might imagine.”

Webster says his older clients are often people who have always wanted a tattoo who now feel it’s more socially acceptable to do so. As the industry continues to shed its lowbrow, fringe-of-society image, a growing number of older people are getting inked. A survey conducted in 2006 by the Pew Research Center found that 10 percent of 41- to 64-year-olds and 7 percent of those 65 and older have at least one tattoo. While those figures may seem insignificant next to 18- to 25-year-olds (36 percent) and 26- to 40-year-olds (40 percent), there’s at least anecdotal evidence to suggest that number is on the rise.

“Tattooing certainly continues to evolve,” says Dan Brown, the editor of “Skin & Ink” magazine, based in Paramus, N.J. “As an industry it’s become very mainstream. When we started to see tattoo shows on TV, I think that signaled just how accepted it has become. People have become more informed about tattoos and there aren’t as many misconceptions out there today.”

Tattooing certainly isn’t a new phenomenon.

Inserting inks into the dermis layer of the skin for decoration has been practiced for centuries worldwide.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, tattooing was seen as a crude, lower-class pursuit, but beginning in the late 1960s, it has gone through a cultural renaissance. Artists with a background in fine arts and design emerged onto the tattooing scene. The trend continued into the 1990s, when an explosion of tattooing in mainstream culture, particularly among middle-class youths, began to emerge.

“When I was 10 years old the only people who had tattoos were bikers, Navy sailors (and) prostitutes,” Webster says. “But over the years it’s become more and more accepted because it’s become more of an art form.”

Tattooing is now firmly entrenched into pop culture. Television shows such as A&E’s “Inked” and TLC’s “Miami Ink” and “LA Ink” have pushed professional tattoo artists into the mainstream. Touring shows, such as the Immersed in Ink Tattoo and Arts Festival, examine everything from techniques to new inks. Visual art institutions have begun displaying works by tattoo artists, including “Freaks & Flash,” the 2009 Chicago exhibition at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, which featured both examples of historic body art as well as the tattoo artists who produced it.

“These people are really thought of as artists,” Brown says. “In many ways they have been accepted into the art community and not just the tattoo industry. That’s why we’re seeing more tattoo art in galleries now.”

Zaq Weaver has literally combined the two ideas in the new shop he opened in downtown St. Joseph in January. Weaver, who has a fine arts background, says his Conception Gallery Custom Tattoos & Fine Art Gallery only does hand-drawn custom tattoo work.

“People who may not like tattoos accept my work because I don’t make tattoos that look like tattoos,” he says. “Our shop is a little bit different because we really try to push something that looks like a work of art.”

Alexa Izokaitis, a tattoo artist at A Touch of Color II, also has a fine arts background and apprenticed under Webster for more than a year to learn the trade.

“I always knew I wanted to be an artist,” she says, “but there’s not a lot of steady jobs out there in art. That’s when I thought, ‘Why not learn how to be a tattoo artist?’”

Izokaitis, who is 33, says the tattoos she has on her own body are deeply personal to her, and that’s something she stresses to clients who come into the shop looking for their first tattoo.

“My body has become my journal,” she says. “Everything I have is important to me and I can look at it and know what I was thinking at that part of my life.”

Her newest tattoo is quite literally a piece of art. Webster is reproducing a piece by the Czech Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist Alphonse Mucha onto Izokaitis’ left thigh.

“The thing that’s special to me is when someone comes in for the first time,” Webster says. “They may have a rough idea of what they want and we sit down and figure out how to make it great. And when we’re finished the look on their face says it all. They are so happy.”

Webster, a 1992 Coloma High School graduate who spent three years in the Marine Corps, says despite the widespread acceptance of tattoos, people should still do their research before walking into any tattoo shop. Until recently, the industry has gone widely unregulated. The state of Michigan’s Public Act 149, enacted in December 2007, now requires all body art facilities to be licensed by the Michigan Department of Community Health, which sets requirements aimed at decreasing the risk of transmission of blood-borne diseases such as HIV. In addition to being licensed, Webster also belongs to the Alliance of Professional Tattooists, a self-governing educational organization that makes sure its members are OSHA approved and certified to deal with blood-borne pathogens, cross-contamination and sterilization.

Webster wears rubber gloves and religiously changes ink and needles. His reputation as a tattoo artist is as clean as his shop. He says the only place he sees any stigma attached to tattoos these days is in the workplace, but he anticipates that too will soon be a thing of the past.

“In 10 years I think even that will be accepted,” Webster says. “I don’t even think it will be an issue because I think tattoos will always continue to grow. I don’t think it will ever fade out because people always want to feel good about themselves and this is one of the ways they choose to do that.”

That has certainly been the case with Boardman, who admits he walks a little taller since he’s gotten his tattoo.

“Part of it is the art form,” Boardman says. “The pain is part of it, too. In a way it’s invigorating.”

Of course not everyone in his age group shares his enthusiasm.

“Both of the tattoos I have, I had J.T. do when my wife was out of town,” Boardman says. “I just took my shirt off one night and she looked at me and said ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I know that she appreciates it for its beauty, but I don’t know if she would say she appreciates that beauty on me.”

Even though Boardman calls the tattoo experience “addictive,” at 67, he says he doesn’t plan to get any more. At least that’s what he tells his wife.

“I’m done,” he says. “But, you know, I always wanted to have the Navy’s silver dolphins. I may have to get one more.”

jbonfiglio@TheH-P.com