 We're going to go ahead and get started. My name is Rebecca Tafel, and I work at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation with Elizabeth Sackler. And we provide additional support to the wonderful and fabulous Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art Staff. And I'm thrilled to welcome you all here. I'm so happy to see a big crowd. So I'm thrilled to welcome you all to Art Sex Power, Tattooed Women Today with Margo Mithlin and Marisa Kukulis. Thank you for all being here today. For the past six years, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art has continued to fulfill its commitment to the past, present, and future of feminist art. Using its award-winning exhibition in education spaces, the Sackler Center strives to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions. Dialogue and debate about feminist art theory and activism take place in the Sackler Center Forum. And groundbreaking exhibitions are held in its feminist art and her story galleries. Currently, these galleries feature two really remarkable shows, worked by hand, hidden labor and historical quilts in the feminist art galleries and Catholic Colwits prints from the war and death portfolios. So if you haven't gone out to take a look at those yet, I really recommend them. But more than just an art gallery, the center is a place that celebrates open and free discourse, conversation, and the exchange of ideas. Elizabeth Sackler could not be here today, unfortunately, because of some ongoing health issues. But she asked me to express how delighted she is to have Margo and Marisa here today to discuss women in tattoos with a particular focus on sexuality, fashion, fine art, and of course, feminism. Margo Mithlin is an author, journalist, and professor who writes about women, art, and contemporary culture. The author of the newly revised Bodies of Subversion, A Secret History of Women in Tattoo. Right here, excellent read. She is written for the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Art News, and Salon.com. Her book, The Blue Tattoo, The Life of Olive Oatman, was published in April 2009. An associate professor in the English Department of Lehman College at the City University of New York, Mithlin also directs the Arts and Culture Program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where she teaches arts journalism. Marisa Cacoulis is a lawyer, author, and editor of NeedlesandSins.com, which is a near daily record of tattoo art, law, and culture. She edited tattoo world for Abrams Books and has authored a series of art books on different tattoo genres for edition ruse publishing. Her latest book for edition ruse, Black Tattoo Art Volume 2, will be released this summer. Cacoulis is also a regular contributor to tattoo industry magazines, including Inked and Skin and Ink. She practices law in Brooklyn, where she was born and raised. So without further ado, please help me welcome Margo and Marisa. Well, it's great to see such a wide variety of people here today, and we're so happy you've joined us. Marisa and I want to thank the Sackler Center for hosting us, as well as Rebecca Taffel, the director of programs, and Jess Wilcox, who helped us get organized. I also want to send a shout out to Elizabeth Sackler, who herself, who I met in a crazy coincidence three years ago. She was coming out of a restaurant across the street from a bookstore where I was doing a signing and happened to wander in. And we met and discovered we had a lot in common. And that's part of the reason, or perhaps the reason, we're here today. Marisa and I are here to discuss tattoo women in honor of the revised edition of Bodies of Subversion. What we'll do is I'll talk first about the history of tattooed women in the West, specifically, mostly the US and Europe. And then she'll join me to discuss a number of themes. We've both been debating and tracking about tattooed women. And then we'll take questions from the audience. Bodies of Subversion is a feminist history of tattoo art that was first published in 1997. I came to tattooing as a cultural critic writing in the 90s for publications like Art News and L. And I noticed a growing number of women getting tattooed and saw that it bridged the two worlds of fine art and pop culture. And I also noticed that the tattooing I saw expressed a variety of feminist and sometimes anti-feminist impulses. Also noticed that tattooing was an amazing barometer of women's hopes and anxieties and ambitions and fears. It was a period when body issues were in the media, sort of the tail end of the culture wars when people were debating date rape, surrogate motherhood, pornography, cosmetic surgery. And many of these issues are still being debated today, especially the date rape issue. People exploring questions of who controls their bodies and why. And tattooing became sort of an answer to some of those issues, a way that women could express their desires through the body. So it made me wonder what tattoos said historically about women in various periods, going back to the 19th century when European and American women first started getting tattooed. I recently updated the book for the third edition because so much happened in tattooing after about 2000 in the new millennium. The techniques and the color improved. The imagery became more expansive once tattooing. The demographic expanded and tattooing entered the middle class and the mainstream. And there's been an explosion of women artists internationally, as well as women getting tattooed. As of last year, for the first time in American history, more women are tattooed than men, 34%. And it all started with this woman, Olive Oatman. She's actually the subject of the book that I was signing when Elizabeth Sackler stumbled on this reading. She was a pioneer in the 1850s. She was traveling west on a wagon train with her family from Illinois when they were attacked by Yavapai Indians in Arizona. Most of her family was killed. She and her sister were taken by the Yavapai, held for a year as slaves, and then traded to Mojave Indians in California who felt sorry for them, adopted them, raised them as their own. And as a piece of that, tattooed her and her sister with this tribal shin tattoo. That was a mark of initiation and also intended for the wearer to be recognized in the afterlife so that your ancestors would see your tribe when you arrived in the afterlife. Interestingly, this shin tattoo is in revival. It's just started. The Mojave now are starting to reclaim it. The Uruk in Northern California have already started this. Maybe five or 10 years ago. And in New Zealand, where they have a very similar shin tattoo tradition, they've been wearing this tattoo as a kind of reclamation of ethnic pride for at least a decade. Sorry, I have a cold, so I got to punctuate this with sips. Oatman was the first technically tattooed woman. But when we think of the history of tattooed women, we tend to think of circus women who didn't really get started until the 1880s. This is Nora Hildebrandt. She arrived at Bunnell's Museum in New York in 1882. So this is almost 30 years after Oatman got tattooed to display her 365 designs tattooed by her father as a means of torture, as she said, after they were captured by Indians in the Wild West. She'd been attacked by the Sioux, menaced by Sitting Bull, orphaned and saved, blinded and cured, and now she appeared scantily clad in a museum of curiosities to describe her ordeal. It was unbelievable, and it was pure fiction. She was tattooed by her husband, Martin Hildebrandt, who was the first shop tattooist in the US, opened a shop on the Lower East Side in the 1880s. Actually, he initially opened a shop in the 1850s, but tattooed her in the 1880s. So a lot of the early circus women used Oatman's story as backstory for their tattoos, claiming they were victims of Indians, even though they were wearing perfectly American imagery. Go figure how Indians would be tattooing American flags on their victims. And then, right about the same period, this woman Irene Woodwardt got going. She was much more famous than Hildebrandt. She was, first of all, very attractive, which helped her career. She traveled in Europe. She was hosted by royalty, who wanted to see her. She was studied by scientists, who wanted to understand how the ink stayed in the skin. She had a very illustrious career and traveled a lot, and her tattoos, you can see they're very heavy. They were hand-done. This was before the invention of the tattoo machine in 1891. This woman, Artoria, was a well-loved circus attraction who started in the 20s. A lot of the women who got into this were lower-class women trying to make a living, and that was the case for her. She was a domestic servant who met a tattooist who tattooed her, and they teamed up to travel together. But Artoria, she loved sideshow life and continued to appear in sideshows and circuses for decades after she needed to. Her husband had some very rewarding oil investments, but that didn't stop her. She performed into her 80s. Edith Burchett was the wife of a famous turn of the century British tattooist, George Burchett. We tend to forget that a lot of high society women were tattooed in the 19th century. In London, starting in the 1870s, women were getting decorative bracelets and portraits and names of their husbands, and so George Burchett was one of the people doing this. He used his wife as his sort of portfolio, and he had traveled in Japan and briefly studied with a Japanese artist. You can see that his style is a little more delicate than some of the previous stuff we've seen, and that's, I believe, due to the Japanese influence. This is, well, a lot of the early women wore religious and patriotic imagery for the purpose of sort of validating their tattoos. This person, Lady Viola, wore portraits of presidents on her chest. She wore the capital building on her back, but something new, as well, in the 20s, pop culture imagery started to creep into tattooing, so she wore celebrities on her thigh, little portraits of Babe Ruth, Charlie Chaplin, and the silent movie actor Tom Mix, and they were all framed in little portraits of, or little frames made of flowers that made them very entertaining. I included this picture in the book because I found it so sad. It's a portrait taken in a bar in probably 1920, during prohibition. It's one of the rare photos where you actually see a freak show in progress. So what happened was the bar couldn't serve liquor and they instead set up the freak show on the bar itself, and you can see, left to right, what do we have here? We have the bearded lady, the living skeleton, the tall man, the fat lady, the legless man, moving to the right, the famous zip, the pinhead, who was a famous circus attraction, and our tattooed lady, a lot of Victoria, whose name was Victoria James, seated on the chair, and then to her right, serpentina, the serpent girl. It's sort of shocking to see the degrading circumstances of these presentations, especially in the context of this elegant bar. Very few women have written about what it was like to be on display like this. The ones who have have talked about how it was mainly just boring, that they had to sit for a long time. But this display in particular seems sort of sad to me. Actually, the artist, the tattooed lady in it, went on to become a tattooist. This is Betty Broadbent. She was a beloved, Betty Broadbent. She was a beloved attraction. She is notable because she appeared in the first televised beauty contest in 1937, fully tattooed. No qualms about entering herself in this. I mean, obviously she didn't win, but it took some courage to do that. I've talked about tattooed ladies, and I just wanna trace the history of women tattooists. The first that we know of was Maude Wagner. She traded a date with her husband to be, who was a tattooist, for lessons in tattooing, and he taught her. They had a daughter who was tattooing by the age of nine, and herself became a tattooist. Actually, the daughter is the only un-tattooed character in my book, the un-tattooed tattooist in my book. She didn't get tattooed because she wanted to be tattooed by her father. Her mom said, you have to wait till you're 18. Her dad died before then. She said, no one else is good enough, and she was never tattooed. Jessie Knight was the first British artist. She started in 1921. She was 17, and she learned from her father. She wears the family crest on her back that her dad tattooed on her. And she was a little bit of a scoop in the context of the new book because I didn't have much on her in the 1997 edition, and then stumbled on her great-nephew who had a whole troupe of photographs and tattoo machines and great stuff in his attic. This is an example of her flash, her designs, probably from the 30s. Another early pioneer was Mildred Hull. She worked on the balleries starting in the 20s. She learned from a well-known circus tattooer named Charlie Wagner, worked in a gritty neighborhood, said that remaining a lady in the business was, quote, strictly a man's job, and boasted of having done fistic combat on hundreds of men. She did, interestingly, sorority girls and debutants. Also did lovers' names and the word mother on a number of women that was popular. And she had a little curtain-off area she used where she tattooed women in intimate places. But she never told what those tattoos were, unfortunately. Ruth Whalen was interesting as a tattooist who did specifically lesbian themes. Some of her work survives. One piece shows two naked women in an embrace. You can see her ladies tattooed free, sign on the wall there. And presumably there weren't that many women getting tattooed or she would've been put out of business with that. And this is Cindy Ray who was known as the classy lassie with the tattooed chassis. She was tattooed, and she's still around. She was tattooed in 1961, over a six-month period. She's actually one of the few who wrote about the experience. It's very interesting to read. She said it was boring. She talked back to people on the platform. She told people, for example, who gawked at her or insulted her, my excuse for being an idiot is I get paid for it. What's yours? And she's only performed or appeared for a year or two and then learned to tattoo. And has been tattooing in Australia for years now. She's 70. She just sold her business, but she still tattoos on weekends. So she made a good career of it. Most of the women I've talked about, actually, Cindy Ray was one of the last great circus attractions. Most of the women I've talked about were professionals. This woman, Elizabeth Weinserl, was an early, heavily tattooed lady who just did it for fun. She was the wife of a doctor. She had two daughters when she got tattooed in her 40s, in the 1940s. And she wears the work of Bert Grimm. She had a favorite artist. And she showed her work for years. Here she is in her 80s. And so you can sort of see how it's an old school style with the solid blocks of color and the dark outlines. The little birds on her arm were inspired by a Cindy Ray design. We all know who this lady is. Speaking of popularizing tattoo, Janice Joplin was one of the first celebrities to be tattooed and inspire women to follow her example. She designed this little Florentine bracelet that she wears here. And then she also had this tiny heart on her breast that you can see. She was tattooed by the artist Lyle Tuttle. And he said when she died, hundreds of women came to him and asked for that little heart tattoo in her honor. This is a pioneer of the modern era. This is Vivien Lozonga. She's a Seattle artist. She learned to tattoo when there were very few women tattooing in the 70s, worked in a shop under a man, didn't consider herself a feminist at all or that she was doing anything pioneering. Until she saw the glass ceiling come down in her shop, she saw men getting promoted over her who were less experienced than she was. And she, here's a piece of her work from probably the 80s or 90s. She was interested in doing feminine motifs as a way of claiming tattooing for women. And by contrast, in New York, Ruth Martin, who I think is here actually, fantastic, hi Ruth. She just raised her hand again so we can see it, thank you so much. Ruth is, yay. I just noticed you. She was doing more experimental designs in New York. She was pushing boundaries with another artist, Jamie Summers, her friend. Jamie was doing TB test patterns. This is a piece Ruth did on the punk singer, Judy Nylon. It's a play on the man-ray piece, The Violin Dongra, where he drew the violin sound holes on the image of Kiki of Montparnasse. And so Ruth told me that she did a lot of extravagant imagery on game, man that they were more game about doing unusual stuff. Women then were a little more conventional wanting butterflies and more typically feminine imagery. So one thing that struck me, as long as we're in an art museum, was in the 70s was the semiotic parallels between performance artists and tattooists at the time. Especially considering each group worked completely unaware of the other. Hannah Wilkie, shown here, scarred herself in quotes by sticking wads of chewing gum on her body shaped like tiny vulvas in a series about beauty rituals that women subject themselves to. Around the same time, Carolee Schneemann performed her piece, Interior Scroll, naked, reading a feminist manifesto that she extracted from her vagina. And Louise Bourgeois was kind of an elder statesman to these, or stateswoman I should say, to these people. She devised this latex breast suit as a sort of comment on how women were shackled by their gender in the art world. So like these artists, women tattooists entered a world in which they had historically served as models and muses and appointed themselves mediums and creators. But many women tattooists just wanted to tattoo like the guys. And one of them was Candy Everett in Hawaii. She did these lovely Hawaiian designs on these Hawaiian dancers, but she actually described herself to me as a buns up shop tattooer. And so she also did this. So that is a portrait of the wearer on his own head. She had a sense of humor, or maybe he had a sense of humor. An important pioneer of the 70s was Jackie Gresham, who was the only well-known black woman artist and is the only well-known black woman artist. One of the sort of unfortunate discoveries I made in updating the book was that nobody has sort of come close to Jackie Gresham or even established fame as a black woman artist since then for various reasons I won't go into now, and which are hard to summarize. I think everybody has a different theory on this. In the 80s and 90s, the genealogy of women tattooists begins to get going. Women are teaching women, and there's a whole history going now. This is a piece by, I'm blanking on her first name, Cynthia Whitken, the wife of the photographer, Joel Peter Whitken, and she was taught by Ruth Martin. Laura Vita was working in San Francisco. You see the work getting more unusual moving away from traditional Americana. And this piece is a biomechanical design by Andrea Elston in New York. This was a very masculine style biomechanical inspired by the Swiss artist H.R. Gieger, Technogothic, Art Nouveau designs. He's the one who designed the sets for the alien films and the alien itself. And then, getting to the late 90s, there's so many women tattooing that there are enough women that this shop employed only lesbian artists. This was called Black and Blue. It was founded by Idaxa Stern, second from the top on the left. And she has actually since told me when I updated the book that she thinks all female shops are a very bad idea. She's not gonna be trying that again. Here's a piece of her work, a beautiful piece. And then we're gonna get to the new millennium now and Marisa and I will talk together. I just wanted to point out that one person was sort of a mind blower for me. You know her, Kat Von D. In the sense that when I wrote the book initially, if you told me that within 10 years, a woman would be the best known tattooist hands down in the world, I would not have believed you. But Kat Von D. did achieve that. And her work was decent. She does, her style is black and gray. She does a lot of portraits. And so that's about when things in my mind really started to take off. This is her portrait of Pope. So I'm gonna sit down with Marisa now and we'll talk, I just wanna say before we do how important she was as a source for me in revising this book. I had stumbled on her blog years ago and found her to be sort of a lone fellow scholar in the wilderness of feminist tattoo critique. She was one of the few, not only writing from a feminist perspective about tattoos, but writing critically about tattoos because there's so little tattoo criticism and the mainstream media. There's scholarly books, but and also the tattoo magazines tend to focus on features and interviews and not on critical appraisal. So I found her writing in her blog and her books to be thoroughly groundbreaking. And I would say in the book Black Tattoo Art that the second version is coming out in the summer. That is one of the most beautiful tattoo books I've ever seen. So I'll join her now. You made me sound fancy. I like that. You are fancy. Thank you. Okay. So we're gonna, I'm gonna ask her a few questions and we're gonna discuss and we're gonna start on the, actually let's start by having Marisa tell us a little about her involvement with tattooing, how she got started. So I'm a heavily tattooed woman and my life, yes! And my life as a tattooed woman began in New York when the art was really underground. So I was young, there was a boy involved, I was underage and my mom is in the audience. So I'm just gonna skip that part and but I do wanna say that at that time to get a tattoo was a pretty clandestine operation. Tattooing was illegal in New York City and that was because there was a ban that was in place in the 1960s because of a hepatitis scare. So when I wanted to get tattooed I had to go to some tenement in the Lower East Side and I had to press this unmarked buzzer and a big man came out and he said, who do you know? And when I gained entry, finally I gained a tattoo. So a lot, a lot has changed since then. The tattoo ban was repealed in 1997 and all of a sudden, soon afterwards, if not that day, you saw shops opening up all over the city and it just became more accessible and people who, you wouldn't really imagine getting tattooed started getting covered in them, like tattooed lawyers. So, and I really wanna make the point that I think that one of the main reasons for this widespread love affair that people are having with tattooing and I think it's completely fitting that we're talking about tattoos in one of my favorite museums, I'm a Brooklyn girl, so this is fantastic, is because the level of artistry in tattooing has risen to such a degree that I think a tattoo can be a fine artwork in itself. So that's just my take on it. Yeah, it's true that we see at this point there's hardly any tattooed type anymore. It cuts across so many demographics. Lena Dunham, who's there now as an example of one person wearing children's book tattoos, you sort of see this variety by the celebrity tattoo imagery. Also, this is Natasha Kai, a soccer player, record-breaking soccer player who wears Hawaiian imagery that expresses her ethnic pride and then Rihanna wearing, I don't know, some junky stuff, but different from these other women. It's gonna be a snobby show. So I wanna ask Marissa though, so these are high-profile women, they can get away with doing their own thing. How has the perception of less famous tattooed women changed in the new millennium? Well, I think a lot has changed and a lot has also stayed the same. Thanks to popular media, I am no longer asked what biker gang I'm in, so that's always good. But funny enough, and this has happened more than one time, when I have to take a flight and I'm in business class for work and I'm showing tattoos, flight attendant comes up to me and whispers, so what band are you in? So there's still that kind of like that rock chick stereotype and I was saying that Miley Cyrus has like 18 tattoos now and we get mistaken a lot for each other, so that was probably what was going on there. But seriously interestingly, people are still surprised when I tell them I'm a lawyer because you don't see representations in the media of women who are in more conservative professional fields, at least not so much as those who are creative. And a lot of it has to do with what we're covering up for work and the tattoos are still there, they're under the suits, they're under the judges' robes, but you're not seeing them because I don't have reality TV show cameras following me around to work and there's a reason for that because it would be very boring. It would not be a fun show. So what is a fun show and what attracts people and what has always attracted people is sex. And what we're seeing now is especially today, just this extreme fetishizing of tattooed women and that's what you're really seeing in the media and you're seeing it in our own industry media and in our own tattoo magazines and magazines I write for which is pretty unfortunate. Just going back, when I started buying tattoo magazines, go to Tower Records in the city, pick them up, on the covers, there would be men on the covers, women, they would be old, they would be young, all shapes, all ages, all colors and they were representative of the tattoo community as a whole. I've been on covers and I've been in the magazines and I was never asked to arch my back or stick my finger in my mouth and look really coy. It was, no one even asked and that was because the focus was on the tattoos. It wasn't about me, it was about my artist and it was about his portfolio, of his walking portfolio. Good point, Bob Baxter who was a former editor of Skin and Ink Magazine which is one of the bigger magazines now, he said that when he put, when the popularity of tattooing started exploding, when he would put a man on the cover of a magazine, new stand sales dropped like 50%, he said. Now, I really don't think that's a huge exaggeration there. Another interesting point is that with the popularity, publishers started saying, well, maybe we can now start marketing to more of the mainstream audience and not just heavily tattoo collectors, we can go beyond and sell more magazines in the new stands and thus sell more advertising. So what do you do? You put a sexy girl on the cover. And today, when you go to Barnes & Noble and you go to your new stand, what you're seeing is almost exclusively sexy women but it's not just women, it's not just beautiful women, they are young and they are thin and they are naked and they may have a small ankle tattoo but they're still naked and that's what bugs me. And that's what bugs me. And again, I'm a huge hypocrite because here I am and I write for these magazines regularly, so. Oh, well tell us a little bit about that, about your subversive motives in writing for them. She has a good reason. I do. I just gotta take a sip because I'm a fast talker. Actually, we'll advance here because this is gonna relate to what we're talking about. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah. Okay. And there's another, just illustrating what you just said. No reason for her, well maybe a reason for her to have her pants off, but certainly not her. And certainly, oh okay, well here's Pat Fish so am I getting ahead of ourselves? No, no, keep it on Pat, keep it on Pat. Okay. I'm gonna give a little background story there. What I wanna first say is, when I first started writing for Tattoo Magazines which was over 10 years ago, it was really super cool because I was being asked to write about, as a lawyer, I was asked to write about the intersection of tattoos and law. And so here was this forum, this really big forum I was given to totally nerd out about something I loved and also get feedback and really cultivate these ideas about tattoo law. And that to me is how I got into writing as a hobby for these magazines. And then I started going to more and more tattoo conventions and I was meeting all these people, all these artists and they had, as you can expect, just fabulous, fabulous stories. And I wanted to tell these stories and again the magazines offered me an outlet to do that. When things started changing and it wasn't about tattoos anymore, it was about the sex, you know I had to ask myself, do I really still wanna be a part of this? I was writing because I loved it. The writing wasn't paying my bills so I could easily just walked away from it. But, and I was talking to Margot about this, but I wanted just to almost subvert the system. So in between all the naked women, I'm gonna have packed fish on those pages. And to the credit, these magazines allow me to do that. So, all right, here you go. Cause I have a quote from her which is awesome. So Pat is a long time tattooer, she's in her fifties. She's been in the game a long time. She lives in Santa Barbara, she loves her mule Toby and she has the saltiest stories and she's a little nutty and I love her. And I pitched an icon profile on her in the magazine, they said sure, whatever you want. And I just love this poll quote over there which I'll read to you, this'll give you an idea of who Pat is, and she says, I think tattoos should be an externalization of one's aesthetics, a clue to what your internal life is like and with a lot of guys, it's fair warning. If they have satan all over them, then think twice about getting them in bed with them. And it was like hours of Pat Fish-isms at these conventions and it's just really fabulous. So, a long answer to a short question is that's why I write for these magazines because I am able to then bring voice to women artists and also male artists who are doing really phenomenal work and pushing the boundaries of tattooing. And I think that's important to kind of work from the inside and hopefully we're gonna get more of these pages in the magazines. Yeah, there's one magazine, Total Tattoo in the UK that's a little different trying to do something less, I don't know, boringly conventionally sexist. There's interest in women's bodies which is fine. Can you talk a little bit about the editor of Total Tattoo? I think is the only female editor in the tattoo magazine industry, is that correct? Sally was one of the only female tattoo editors for a long time, but then you also have Scandinavian magazines that have female editors and there were women involved in as designers in some of our magazines back in the day in the US and in New York. But Sally's important because she ran Skin Deep Magazine, one of the very big tattoo magazines in the UK and also she kind of started off this new magazine called Total Tattoo. And further to what Bob said before, Sally understands you're gonna sell more magazines with a woman on the cover, but it can be a beautifully tattooed woman on the cover. It can be a focus on the artistry as well as the beauty and you don't have to say we're gonna put some old, sloppy guy, you know, because we wanna be feminists, you know? So Sally understood that because she recently retired. So I was, you know, we talked about this concern about not having so many women running these magazines and the good thing is I'm seeing kind of like a backlash now to this lad mag tattoo magazine thing. And so you have women saying no, no, we are now the tattoo majority. We want publications that reflect us and that speak to us and that are interesting to us. So you have like a lot of young, there's a group of young women in the UK. They recently started a magazine called Things and Ink and it's just about, you know, it's really made by women for women and they talk about things like what it's like to be a tattooed woman. They have a feminist perspective. You see a lot more blogs being written by women and critically thinking about it. So I think this is a great trend and really wonderful. And we need more women as writers and we need more women as editors and designers in order for it to speak to us. What a lot of women are signing up to do and I wanted to just briefly talk about this tattoo model phenomenon where young women are looking at being a tattoo model is like a career choice. You know, when they grow up, they wanna be tattoo models. And what I've learned is that this is not a lucrative career choice. And I'll tell you why because, okay. So one model was telling me that she goes to a shoot for one of the glossiest magazines, widespread huge amount of advertising. She gets to the shoot and the photographer's getting paid, the photographer's assistants getting paid, the makeup, the hair people, everybody at that shoot got paid except for her, the talent. And the reason for that was because outside of the shoot there was a line of women, young women, waiting to take their clothes off and do it for free and get that love and get that affirmation. And so why would you pay her when you have a whole line of people waiting to be posing, you know, not Pat, you know. But you know, to get up there. And so I wanna, you know, I want, when I talk to young women I want to say you are beautiful and you are smart and you can be, you can run that magazine and that's why you wanna go ahead. Now, I also wanna go off on another tangent because you and I have been laughing about this. So I tried to kind of subvert the system again and I did this, I wanted to do this series on the blog called Objectified Tattooed Men and kind of switch around and sort of the tattooed models would be dudes. And nobody really wanted to do it and there were no line of men outside my door waiting to take off their clothes. The ones that did, you didn't want them to, you didn't want to see them. You know, I made my boyfriends really cute. I made him do it, you know, as a joke and everybody, all the other guys who were in the Objectified Tattooed Men series were all like my friends, boyfriends who were forced to do it. And a lot of them also did the classic poses that like sticking their finger in their mouth and, you know, being all cutesy. But yeah, that series didn't go very far and because I wasn't paying them. So I just thought that was an interesting phenomenon and I wanted to bring that up. But another reason is no one was really crying out. You know, my readers weren't really saying we want to see more naked guys on the site. Even, you know, everybody, a wide audience were saying, well, we like seeing tattoos on women's bodies. They look beautiful on women's bodies and of course they do and I get that but there's a way to do it so that it's, you know, so that we all love it and we all love to look at it. Yeah, that said, we've talked a lot about how there is certain female specific tattoo applications but not really particular guy tattoo applications. What are some of the designs that are specific to women? Well, first I want to say that so women, I mean, really throughout the centuries and in just a myriad of different cultures we get tattooed to enhance the body. So the way a tattoo looks, a placement is almost as important as the design because you want something that's really just really harmonizes and becomes really organic and a really good tattooist know how to play with the body so that it almost looks like the woman was born with that tattoo. So that's why some tattoo placements are more popular than others which brings me to what a term that I think a lot of people in this audience have heard, the tramp stamp. Anybody not hear about the tramp stamp? Better define it just to be sure. All right, it's a horrible, horrible term for lower back tattoo and it's a tattoo that was pretty popular in the 90s and the late 90s and even after that and because of the popularity of the lower back tattoo it became a joke. So I recently did a Google search for lower back tattoo and this is like one of the first images that came up and if you can't read what it says underneath it says, just because it's a Bible quote doesn't make you look any less like a slut. It's a Bible quote and I just was thinking about this was something that's really important to this girl whether you think it's, whether you like the tattoo or not, this was something that was something she really wanted on her body and it's degraded in that way and in such a fashion. Also Marissa, just to chime in, when I was doing the first edition of Bodies an LA artist Jill Jordan referred to this as the chick spot and it was much more kind of a wholesome description of it. She said it's a really lovely place for a woman to get tattooed, it can taper the waist, it fits nicely in the small of the back and somehow along the way it became the tramp stamp and who knows why. The reason it's popular is it's a great place to get tattooed, it doesn't get the sun too much and the skin, it ages really well, you can cover it if you want, you could get a little glimpse if you want, you can show it all off if you want, it's just a really great spot but it's not, despite that it's not a spot I would recommend today because of this tramp stamp stigma. Then maybe we can go to the next slide. So another really popular spot really for the same reasons because it ages really well, there's an artist can really work with the harmony of the body, it's kind of like the side torso, kind of like the ribs tattoos, this is a really, really painful tattoo, take it from me but it looks really good and Megan Fox, the movie actress, when she started showing up in magazines with this, I mean tons of copies came out, a lot of young women were getting this tattoo, it's a sexy tattoo, it's beautiful and so naturally with that popularity comes the derogatory terms and now people call it the skank flank and I'm just like, we can't get a break. And men do it in the same spot and it's not called that. What's that? Yeah, there's no, I was thinking, I was talking to Brian last night, I'm like, is there any derogatory word for like a tattoo placed on a man, like the broho tattoo or I couldn't, no, there is none, like sat there and we thought about it and so as I was thinking about it, for this lecture, and just in general, like why do we have these derogatory terms and it's because tattooing is so powerful when we take control of our bodies, when we change them the way we want and create them the way we want them to look and feel really strong and powerful about that, that is seriously intimidating to people and they want to take you down so hence the skank flank and tramp stamp. And then conversely, there are female specific tattoo styles that are positive, there is a couple. Right. Marisa and I will both address. Yeah, I've been pretty negative so I want to talk about something really awesome and amazing and life affirming and when I think about what is the most really beautiful and exciting tattoos today, I think about what artists are doing in covering up scars like mastectomy scars and as you mentioned before, back after a woman would undergo mastectomy, tattoos were brought in but they were there for kind of like the areola tattooing and 3D tattoos for nipple reconstruction so that it would look like a nipple but it wasn't really seen as decorative and as you mentioned before with new techniques and new colors, artists really having an understanding of anatomy in the body and working with difficult skin, we're seeing now the ability to transform women who've undergone really serious surgeries and do something really beautiful like this work here. I just want to briefly mention this work. It's done by an artist called David Allen, he's fantastic, he works in a variety of tattoo genres and he's based in Chicago. This woman is Adriana and she had stage three breast cancer when she was 31 and this was a 1999 so she had a radical mastectomy, reconstruction, several follow-up surgeries, chemo and radiation and her body was just put through the mill and she lived with it for about 10 years and just one day she said that, what was her quote? She said she was tired of looking disfigured and so she decided to make an appointment for her first tattoo and she went to David and she said, I want something floral, just do whatever you can on the scar and this is what he came up with and I think it's really amazing and when it was done she said to David that she felt whole again and she felt repaired and she wanted to flash her boobs to everybody, she was so excited about it and that to me is what's amazing, maybe you can go to the next slide, we've gone beyond just covering up scars, it's a fully transformative process, it helps women celebrate our bodies again and that's why I just think it's the coolest thing. A lot of the women who do this do see it as sort of a political act in the sense that women like this woman who decided not to have breast reconstruction, did it because a couple of women told me that they chose not to have the reconstruction, they wanted to accept what their body was post-surgery and not sort of pretend that they are somebody they no longer are. So this is by an artist named Tina Bafaro in Seattle. This image is interesting because it was posted on Facebook by a Canadian tattoo collective and you know this story and Facebook took it down as part of its decency policy and the collective put it back up and it became this sort of game where they kept taking it down and he kept putting it back up but the people who put it up made it an activist gesture, they said we want to, we invite you all to repost this image because we find this woman to be really courageous and creative in what she did with her body. So it went viral, it got reposted about I guess 350,000 times and Facebook finally gave up. But what's interesting is that it was even at issue at all, the woman has no breast so the fact that there's, it's considered erogenous somehow the site of where the breast were is still considered indecent and never mind the fact that she's basically wearing a shirt. She's wearing a tattooed shirt. So just kind of an interesting example of one odd cultural reaction to this. We tend to focus on tattoos as a kind of empowerment. We talk, Marisa and I talk a lot about this in the sense that it gives women a sense of autonomy over their own bodies at a time when there's so much pressure for women to conform to a certain look. But I want to ask, I want to say that, we agree it's not innately feminist but I want to ask you to talk about ways that it's still used demeaningly. There are a few examples out there that's interesting. It's actually part of the saddest part of how tattoos are used. So beyond the whole tramp stamp and skank flank thing, I mean tattoos are still used as a form of domination and degradation and we see it really with human trafficking. Now the ancient Greeks used to mark their slaves as owners of colonial times. We did the same thing here and that practice of marking your slaves as your property is still going on today. And maybe we can go to the next slide. It's a really sad example here. This is a young woman, she's 16 years old and her name is Lisa and she, her pimp wanted her, he forced her to brand his name on her inner lip and he said to her, and she actually told a reporter, when I'm not focused on him and his goals, he would say, look in the mirror, whose name is that? And she looks in the mirror every day and she's still reminded of that even though she's moved away from that life or she's gotten out of that life. And then the barcode is sadly another common tattoo on victims of sex slavery and it denotes that these women are products to be bought and traded. And this particular image was on a woman who is freed from a prostitution ring in Madrid in Spain and that ring was run by a group of guys dubbed the barcode pimps and the Spanish police recognized the barcode. Actually, I don't know if you can really see it but that number underneath is the money she owed these guys in order to gain her freedom. So it's just a really sad tattoo and they would describe, the police said that these women were described as packages and it wasn't just about ownership. These women would get tattoos if they tried to escape. So when they were caught and brought back, they would get tattoos as a reminder that you can't leave and you are our property and you are owned and I think it's some of the more heartbreaking tattoos. I do wanna mention though that there is more education and dissemination of information about how tattoos are being played out and how they're used in human trafficking. So last February, the National Tattoo Association joined up with the Polaris Project which works to fight human trafficking and so there was information sent out to studios and to artists about what to look for with these tattoos and what could be considered a tattoo that's a part of this kind of sex slavery and how to report it. So despite the horror of it, we're seeing a movement in the tattoo community to kind of combat this. And one more. Oh yeah, okay. This facial tattoo was not forced on this woman. It's worth discussing though and that's why we wanted it to bring it up. I wanna give the backstory first. So this young woman, Lesia from Russia, she meets a guy online called Ruslan and they fall in love. And so a couple of months, I think it was in January, they meet in person and after a week together, they decide they're gonna get engaged. So she writes on her Facebook page and that's how I got this information through another website called BMEzine who actually interviewed them. She said that she wanted to show her commitment to Ruslan and let me backtrack, Ruslan is notorious. He's actually a Belgium tattoo artist who is known for just tattooing young women's faces. He just gets off on it. I don't know if you heard a news story about some young girl with stars tattooed on her face and she claimed that she woke up and it was just done on her and because her parents got mad, this is the guy who did it. He has a pattern, a portfolio of young women in getting these facial tattoos. So that is his name across her face and she makes it clear that she did it willingly. She wanted to show her love for this man and that's how she was gonna do it. The reason why we're talking about this today is because I still, I can't get over the feeling that this is still a form of domination that I wonder if this guy is really gonna take responsibility for this tattoo, for the longevity of that tattoo and... And where is his permanent tattoo honoring his commitment to her? He doesn't have a face tattoo of her and her name so I still can, even though she says it was willful, she did it willingly, I still see that as a form of domination as well. So... Similar example, this tattoo was tattooed on a woman in Chicago by her abusive boyfriend and it was used against her in court when she pressed charges against him. The defense said, well, why would she be pressing charges against him? She obviously loves him. She has his name tattooed on her wrist. In the end, she won and he got put away but this one has sort of a happy story because there's an organization called Sacred Transformations in Chicago and it's an organization that helps people who are marked, men and women, in any degrading way, whether from burns, from bullet wounds, from needle marks, from cutting. And this woman got this cover up tattoo through Sacred Transformations. You can see it in progress here and then it was transformed into a butterfly. So the organization makes sure that it's not just about covering up the mark, it's about committing to a healthy lifestyle and healthy relationships and going through a program that's sort of transformative. So that's a kind of reclamation tattoo. Oh, we have a couple of others sort of in the same vein. Right, and you mentioned reclamation and so on my blog on needlesandcents.com we have this great Facebook group where we get into these discussions on tattoos. So I had posted a couple of questions. You know, what is reclaiming the body through tattoo mean? And in my head, I was thinking something like this. You know, someone who has a trauma as a dark period and they get a tattoo as kind of, again, in a life-affirming way to remind themselves that the dark period is over, to be strong. So that was in my mind. And then I got called out on it, which was wonderful because one person wrote and a friend of mine wrote, isn't it enough to just live in this world for one to have a need to reclaim the body that you don't have to go through a dark period? You could reclaim your body through tattoos just going through this life and living it. And I thought that was a great point and there were just so many great points and I know I've been talking too long, but if you go on my site needlesandcents.com or you look for us on Facebook, get involved in that discussion. You'll see some really, really wonderful points being made on that. They were actually in anticipation of this lecture. Marisa put the word out saying we're gonna be addressing these various issues and people went crazy and are posting now all sorts of stuff. Oh, so just tell about these two. Well, those were on women who had cut themselves and engaged in a pattern of self-harm and once they stopped doing that and got really healthy, they wanted something to kind of commemorate, not commemorate, but they wanted something to honor their strength in moving forward and having really wonderful lives. And use one more. Exactly, a reminder to stay strong. So before we, one more question then we'll show you a few great images then we'll take questions. The cultural context of tattooing, people's responses to tattoos vary in different cultures. And I wanted to ask about how your tattoos have registered differently in your travels. Right, first, it's very interesting, the intersection of culture and tattoos. And oh, there's a really, really great example that happened just a couple weeks ago about a cultural response to tattoos and that involved the comedian and actress Margaret Cho. And I don't know if you know her, she's an activist, she's seen her on TV on Drop Dead Diva and she's also really a tattooed badass, I love her. So she goes to a Korean, Margaret's Korean, so she goes to a Korean spa in LA and she understands what people, she speaks the language, she understands what people are talking, that they're talking negatively about her. She's like, fine, I'm just gonna chill out. And then someone comes up to her and says, we need you to cover up because your tattoos are disturbing the other patrons. And here is a woman who brought the first Korean American family to sitcoms, to television in the 90s and she was seen as just this horrible representation of Korean culture amongst all these women that were there. So they actually told her to cover up and she got so pissed off that she went on Jezebel.com which is a fantastic feminist blog and she wrote about her experience and I just had to pull one quote because I thought it was fabulous. She wrote, their intolerance viewing my nakedness as if it was some kind of assault on their senses like my ass was a weapon made me furious in a way I can't even really express with words and that's quite impressive because this bitch has something to say and she went on and she name dropped that LA spy I can't remember what the name was but and she called them out for it and I thought it was really wonderful because I got it and I understood exactly what she went through as a Greek American woman and this is the last term I'm gonna tell you before we go to questions. And here she is. Yeah, there's Margaret, okay. So the reason why they got upset and why a lot of people in my own Greek community is because they want you to look a certain way because they believe that everybody represents the culture. There's in Greek there's a word called like a philotima and it's your reputation and how people view you and your the respect for the family. So keep that in mind. Story coming, here it comes. All right, so and this is just one story and this will encapsulate my life as a Greek woman and also how culture plays into tattooing. So I had just completed my sleeves and I was very, very excited to show them to the world and so I usually go to Greece once a year to see my family but before I wanted to go through that trauma I wanted to go, I love you mom. I wanted to go to the island of Mikanos. I don't know if anybody knows Mikanos but it is a party island. It's described as gay mecca. It's like heaven for drag queens and it's a good time. So here I am and I'm walking down this cobblestone street at night and in front of me is just this fabulous queen and just the total stereotype. She's got the sequin dress on and the boa and she's working the heels on the cobblestones and she passes this old Greek lady also like a stereotypical old Greek lady. She's wearing black, she's thick, she's got like feta crumbs on her dress and you know it's like, it's like out of a movie you know. But she's sweeping outside her store so the queen just nods and smiles and says hello and the old woman looks up and nods and smiles and says hello. So I walk by and I'm gonna impress her with my Greek which isn't so great and I'm like, gali spara, good evening. And she looks me up and down, horrified by the fact that I am Greek and she goes, oh, she spits on the floor. I don't want to ruin that point. She spits on the floor and she goes, oh, I'm gonna stick it on a yacht. And she calls upon the Virgin Mary to save my soul because of my tattoos. And she looked at me and she's like, what are you doing? Why do you look like this? How can you be, what happened to our nice Greek girls and I'm not a nice Greek girl. So, and it's very hard because I love my culture. I'm fiercely proud of it. I love going to Greece, but what I didn't really realize when I was getting heavily tattooed is how that would really impact my life within my culture, within my extended, my family's really, my parents are cool, my sister's fabulous. But my extended family still have not really accepted it and I never really saw that kind of culture shock coming so that I think is also, and because I'm a tattooed woman because you don't really see that with tattooed men. And so that was the final point I wanted to bring up. And we're gonna throw up a few images of nice tattoos that we wanna introduce you to. All right, very briefly. This is absolutely one of my favorite tattoos. It's done by an artist in London called Thomas Thomas and Thomas is particularly known for his geometrical patterns on the body. And what I was talking about before about creating that harmony and fluidity with the body, I think this is an exact perfect example of that. That tattoos don't have to be just a literal image. They can simply be patterns and decorative and have that power. So that's a great example of that. And this is, in contrast to that, this is a piece from a husband and wife team called the Buena Vista Tattoo Club in Germany. And they described their work when I asked them, well, how do you describe this style of work? And they say, it's trash polka. And I have no idea. It's not even like, it's not even a term. Like no one goes around and you say, hey, here's my trash polka tattoo, you know. But we're seeing a trend and if you ask me what the main tattoo trends are, a lot coming out of Europe especially is like these just very bold, highly graphic in your face. It goes against kind of like the traditional tattoo tenants of what a tattoo is supposed to be. You see a lot of the scratching. It's kind of almost like a feverishness of art brute, for example. And I think that's a good example of a tattoo of what I would say graphic modern interpretations of tattooing, I don't call it trash polka. Okay, this back piece is by an artist in Japan called Genko. And what he's renowned for is what we call color bombs. They are just these big graphic cartoon and comic inspired images. Why I chose this one is you see a lot of these images on men and you don't really see a lot of these comic tattoos necessarily on women or at least in the past. Now you're seeing more and more of them. And what I really like about it is like you can still have something that's got like a girly subject matter to it, but it's still powerful. It is bold. You can see it from across the street. It still really holds. It grabs your attention and it's girly. So I loved it. It's beautiful. This is an artist in Buenos Aires called Lazlo Kis. And what I thought he does really interesting is he takes kind of, he's inspired by indigenous tattooing, these black patterns and how they flow with the body, but he also makes them in a very modern and abstract way. And we see, and that's really what my book Black Tattoo Art is about is modern interpretations of the tribal. And we do talk about indigenous tattooing and show examples of a revival these days of indigenous tattooing, but I just really get excited when I see how these images are interpreted today. And that's a good example of that. This is Amanda, Amanda's in the audience. And I know you love this piece, so you're gonna. Yeah, well, happily, I was gonna just say that she's a great artist who like many recent youngish artists has an art school background. I included this because it's so amazing she does these abstract pieces that are not typical for tattoos, but I did ask Amanda before we started if she would tell us a little bit about it. Maybe we can give you a mic if you're not audible. And Amanda's an artist who doesn't make a huge distinction between being a tattooist and being a visual fine artist. Sometimes she does paintings that people ask her to tattoo onto their bodies. Wow. Yeah, this is the final tattoo image. And this is a work done by a hugely renowned tattooer working in the Japanese style in his modern interpretations of Japanese art called Shige of Yellow Blaze. And he's in Yokohama. And I'm not gonna give you a history of tattooing in Japan, like that's a whole five days. But tattooing in Japan, it's been going on since the Edo period and even beyond that there's indigenous Japanese tattooing. But in contemporary Japanese tattoo culture it is still very, very taboo. It's still kind of, not so much these days anymore, but for so long it's been associated with the criminal underground with the Yakuza. And so if you are heavily tattooed you belong to a crime syndicate. And to see something so beautiful on a Japanese woman to really decorate the body in that gorgeous fluid way, I just wanted to end on that image to show what the possibilities of tattooing are, how powerful they are, how wonderful and sexy and beautiful and what a great work of art it can be. And again, I really believe that it is very fitting that we are in a museum and talking about tattoos and this is one of the reasons. Thank you, and we'll take your questions. Someone in the back, I see a hand. Oh, it went down. Thank you so much for the talk, that was great. Any question? I know that you mentioned a couple of times the statistic that there's actually more real order tattooing than that. I don't know if it's just in the US or where that's and I was wondering if you saw kind of a feminization of tattooing in general happening or if it's people's perception or is it just that there's more people getting tattooed and there's more finding what works. How tattooed is there a field that I can't even, how tattoos are seen on the body is the most women's body do you have anything to say about it? You addressed that in your book for a bit so maybe you wanna, I definitely wanna speak to that but maybe you wanna. I'm forgetting where I address it in my book. So you just start. All right, well we're basing our, when we talked about the statistics of more women being tattooed we're basing that on a recent Harris poll which came out, what was it, two years ago or was it last year? In 2012. In 2012 and that's when the stats came up and said that there were more women in the United States getting tattooed and I think there's a similar poll but don't call me on it in the UK but you made an excellent point. Is it, there is absolutely a feminization of tattoo art and I wonder, because there's just so many more bodies out there and there's so many more requests and people are able to see what the possibilities of tattooing are and how they can interpret their own feelings on their bodies. That's when we're seeing more and more of that in these different representations of self but as I mentioned in the beginning telling my silly story about coming to tattoos myself it's more accessible so anybody, any teenager can go to the mall and get tattooed so you have really young women, really young women going out there and really not thinking ahead and getting the Gwen Stefani portrait on their back and you know and it's instant gratification so and someone just feels like I wanna feel really good about myself I'm gonna go get a tattoo and that is wonderful but you also have to think about well what's behind that and so I'm giving a long answer to your question but I think with younger women getting tattooed with not a lot of information being considered with those decisions we're seeing the rise of women just getting tattooed for the sake of getting tattooed to get that acknowledgement because they wanna feel sexy and that's where this whole tattoo model thing is coming about. And I think a little piece of it too is if you look at fashion historically from the 19th century till now you see sort of the unbuttoning and uncorseting of women progressively from the skirt lengths coming up in the 20s to the mini skirt in the 60s to now Beyonce performing without her pants on basically we just show a whole lot more skin and I think women are taking the opportunity to tattoo it because they can show it. Yes. The body not being something like me can I just sketch it? All right, that's a good reason. There's a commitment that's made to your art and it seems like it must be an enormous commitment that you think that then when you're 20, whatever that you're going through the rest of your life that that artist, that form is still expresses you and I just wonder how people deal with that but it's pretty good, it makes a significant commitment. It's a great point, I love your etch a sketch comic too, that's cool. But I think back, you know when, cause I was hanging out and I skipped that story cause my mom's in the room but I was hanging out in tattoo shops when I was a teenager and I think back if I could have gotten tattooed at that moment I would have got like a Duran Duran. So having these barriers to getting tattooed was a good thing for me and I actually didn't start getting heavily tattooed until my 30s but that commitment is still part of the magic of tattooing. Like when I started thinking like I'm gonna get on my whole back done right before we were gonna do it and I was like oh shit, what am I doing? And it's that commitment for life that adds to the bad assness of tattooing. So good point. Terry, I love you. I hope it's okay if it's a comment. Sure is your question. I just wanted to say first of all, Marissa knows that I can probably relate to every single word that came out of your mouth and the most important for me is the topic you touched on about the objectification of women and the mainstream tattoo magazines going for the younger, I mean I'm 49, heavily tattooed, I'm of Jewish descent, I'm a teacher for 22 years and hello, I'm not white trash and I'm not going to get, I'm not going to line up for that certain photographer who I believe I know who you're speaking about. That was a bunch of them. And I will not line up and get tattooed, I'm sorry, I will not line up and wait for a picture to be taken to be told that I must have my hand over my breast and everything removed and I can cover myself if I want to. So I have been basically blacklisted from some of these Facebook pages and some of these tattoo, major tattoo publications because they're looking for, I don't know if it's okay to say the name or not. I'm not saying it, but you can. They're looking for the blanked girl. They're looking for the blanked doll. The tattooed doll, the inked girl. I don't know where I'm going. And I will write to them and say, why don't you do a feature on tattooed women? I have a page called Tattooed Professionals that there's a whole other area and I was so thankful that you mentioned things and inked the publication in England because that magazine is all about the life and the style of tattooed women and the fact that you don't have to be a doll or a girl and you do not have to be naked in front of the camera to love it. So thank you for bringing that up. Thank you, Terri. You know, I get naked in front of the camera a lot because I'm like working on a body suit. So, you know, exactly. So I've no problem getting naked for a magazine. It's just the way they're shot these days and I have been naked in magazines and but I always felt proud of it because it was never in a way that I felt kind of degraded me in any way. And it was a reason for being naked. I didn't have the ankle tattoo and then I'm in a bikini. You know, it was because I was fully tattooed. Sure. Oh God. That's a whole other... I'm just right here. I know, I know. All right. So thankfully, because I used to work in, I lived in Belgium for eight years and I worked in very, very conservative law firms in Brussels. And thankfully in that time, you know, no one really knew because when I go to work, like I got my suit on, my hair's back, I have glasses. You know, I'm like, you know, I'm the Linda Evans to my Wonder Woman. Like no, I'm Linda Evans. Linda Carter. So no one really knows. But recently, again, this is a really, really short story. Most of my clients are creatives and a lot of them are actually tattoo artists but I do have a couple of conservative clients and I was at the gym, not in Brooklyn Heights, not too far away from here and I'm coming out of the shower and I got my towel around me and I'm like, you know, trying not to fall as I'm walking to the locker room and I bump into a woman and it is one of the directors of one of my big clients and she just looked at me and she's like tall, statuette, gorgeous woman. She's looking down upon me and she goes, this is so incongruous. She's like, this is just incongruous. She's like, she touched me. I'm like, I'm naked. And she's like, I don't, I don't. She's like, this is great, it's beautiful. Oh my God, you're naked. Oh, I'm sorry, go. And then everybody in the whole, and she went crazy and everybody in the locker room staring and I still have that account and she loved, it made me, now she's like, hey, let's go for dinner because she thinks I'm more interesting now. I'm sorry. Such a disappointment. So yeah, so it's actually helped me but when I first started, I started in law 15 years ago, no, I would think I'd be fired actually because they may think that I would never be able to go to bat for a big client because I was alternative and how could I possibly advocate for Microsoft if I'm a freak, you know. So I would, you know, right. So should we take one more? Okay. Okay, I'll lay it back. Hi, this is actually a comment as well. I'm a survivor of trafficking in the sex trade and I've also experienced a significant number of violence in the sex trade. I just want to make a couple of suggestions that may be an idea for folks to think about. One, I would suggest a trigger warning because I need to really, really talk about human trafficking today and I'm sorry, that's okay. And also, I think that one really awesome thing that tattoo artists can do, people who have survived trafficking in the sex trade experience a lot of poverty and poverty is a big factor for why folks get trafficked. And covering up tattoos is really difficult. We don't have any money to do it. So one really awesome thing that tattoo artists can do is they can donate their time to get folks to get tattoos they're covered up. That would be an amazing thing that the tattoo industry could do to support people who experience trafficking. And that's what the man at Sacred Transformations in Chicago is doing. It's a non-profit. He's not, you know, charging for his tattoos. Similar idea. But we need more of that, absolutely. And the fact that there was some, you know, some awareness last year in the National Tattoo Association and bringing more of a dialogue to the tattoo community, hopefully we're gonna see more of that because you're absolutely right. And the issue of poverty and tattoos and because tattoos are expensive these days too is another excellent point. Well, we'll close there. I just wanna make one point about tattoo art in general which is that since we're at the Brooklyn Museum, I wanna say that art museums tend to be very resistant to tattooing as an art form. And, you know, for various reasons, whether that it's confusing, is it fashion, is it design, is it fine art? Or because of the fact that it can't be sold or because of the fact that there's a class bias against it. I have to say, except for an article I wrote for Art News in December, I haven't seen a single feature on tattoo art in an art magazine since 1981 by Marcia Tucker, the former director of the new museum. And so I say all that by way of saying thank you to the Sackler Center for being so forward-thinking and open-minded and hosting us. Thank you. Thank you.