Every other Saturday, Hans Haedelt leaves his home in Westchester County, N.Y., and makes the hour-long drive to Shotsie’s tattoo studio in Haledon, N.J. There Haedelt, a 28-year-old record executive, prostrates himself on a table for three hours while tattooist Shotsie Gorman pricks his back thousands of times with inky needles. For the next week, Haedelt is miserable, bandaged and sore. He won’t fully heal for two weeks … and then it’s back to the drawing board.
It’s the most painful trend since whalebone corsets: tattooing, the art of the primitive and the outlaw, has been moving steadily into the fashion mainstream. Haedelt’s case, of course, is extreme–most of the rank and file “getting inked,” as it’s called, are following in the more discreet footsteps of celebrities like Cher, Melanie Griffith, Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, Prince and Dolly Parton. Mark Gastineau and Brigitte Nielsen had their names inscribed on each other’s epidermis, in much the same way lovers used to carve their initials in trees. Woodstock, the bird from the “Peanuts” comic strip, flutters above Whoopi Goldberg’s left breast. At a World Series game, Roseanne Barr and her husband, Tom Arnold, bent over to unveil their own ample art works. From movies like “Cry-Baby” to advertisements for The Gap, tattoos are everywhere.
Twenty years ago there were an estimated 300 professional tattoo “shops” in the nation; today there are probably 4,000. At Spaulding & Rogers in upstate New York, the largest suppliers of tattoo equipment, sales have doubled in the last year alone. Says Ed Hardy, an internationally known tattoo artist: “Really, it’s an absolute explosion. What’s counterculture gets melted down and utilized by the rest of society.”
“There’s been a significant demographic shift,” says Clinton Sanders, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut who studies tattooing. “It’s moved up the cultural system. The clients are more and more commonly people in managerial and professional positions. Far more people than you think have tattoos. They don’t tell because it’s stigmatized.”
But less so now than ever. At Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip Tattoo, Joe Durso recently had a small picture of Winnie the Pooh, his snout buried in an upturned honey pot, tattooed on his lower right hip. “I think most people try to find something that relates to them,” says the 26-year-old bank employee, who grew up in Florida near Disney World. “There aren’t many things I’d want on my body for life, but I know that Winnie the Pooh will always be my favorite character.” And, says Durso, his tattoo says a lot about the kind of person he is: nice, but often in trouble.
Karen Chance, 30, a graphics designer in Atlanta, wears a Siamese fighting fish on her shoulder and a passable likeness of the Venus of Willendorf on her right leg. “It’s always the first slide in art-history class,” she jokes. “They make me feel a little exotic, but I sometimes think, ‘Whatever possessed me?”’
Until the late ’60s, tattooing was an art practiced by sailors, then bikers, then frat boys like former secretary of State George P. Schultz, who, as a student at Princeton, was adorned with a tiger clawing his posterior. But in recent years, tattooing has undergone a transformation. The best tattoo “studios,” as they’re now called, feature sterile settings, custom designs, painstaking technique and artists who have had formal training in traditional fields.
The new artists are producing astonishing tattoos. Realistic portraiture is increasingly popular–people are getting tattooed with lifelike renditions of spouses, children, even pets. Haedelt, for instance, hosts a Miltonian mural. On his left side and back, Lucifer falls from heaven to hell as the angels sadly look on. On his right side and back will be a picture of renewal, two bodies rising from the water. When complete, the tattoo will cover his back down to the thighs and sweep forward across his rib cage. It will cost slightly more than $10,000.
For most converts, though, tattooing is simply a form of personal expression. Andrea White, 25, a manager at an Atlanta bookstore, sports an authentic reproduction of an Aubrey Beardsley illustration for a 19th-century edition of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome.” The glyph, hidden on White’s hip, shows the dancer holding high the head of John the Baptist.
White recently added a Celtic cross to her shoulder. “The only bad thing about tattooing is that it’s kind of addictive,” she notes. Perhaps more to the point, tattoos are permanent. Says Sanders: “That’s really part of the power of the tattoo–its permanence displays commitment. But that’s often misplaced. Very few things in life are permanent.”
