Tattoos, once fringe, now near ubiquitous
If you saw Josh McQuade on the street, you might be intimidated. He is covered in tattoos; they’re on every inch of his arms and scrawled across his hands. His dog’s name, Eisa, is etched above his right eyebrow. But Mr. McQuade was once scared to even enter a tattoo shop. The clientele were, often, on the rough side: bikers, sailors and criminals were the usual suspects.
“You were lucky to get in, get your tattoo and leave,” Mr. McQuade, a Monroeville resident who owns Pittsburgh Tattoo Company, said. The 45-year-old tattoo artist said he actually misses when tattooing was fringe. “It’s more salon-ish now. I want it to be mean again.”
When Mr. McQuade began working as a professional tattoo artist over 25 years ago, he would worry about who was sitting in his chair.“It was nerve wracking, because you didn’t know who was a gangster and who wasn’t,” he recalled.
But over the ensuing decades, body art has transformed from being the mark of the outsider to a nearly ubiquitous fashion statement. Pop stars, actors, police officers and teachers — people of all walks of life — now show their tattoos with pride.
Case in point: Katie Ernstberger, a teacher who grew up in Waynesburg and now lives in Germany.
Ms. Ernstberger, 28, and her 31-year-old sister, Hannah Kirby, were under Mr. McQuade’s pen just weeks ago to get tattoos of a Celtic cross and Celtic knot, respectively. They were raised by a biker father with more tattoos than they could recall, but these were their first.
“We’re the prudes in the family,” Ms. Kirby said.
Only a few years ago, getting a tattoo was seen as a taboo for a teacher, Ms Ernstberger said.
“When I graduated college, they were all like, ‘Oh, no tattoos,’ ” she said, but now, it’s not so stigmatized.
“People used to say, ‘I can’t get a tattoo because I’m a professional,’ ” Michael Flores, owner of Carson Street Tattoo, said. “A professional what? I’m no less professional than you because of what I do.”
Millennials in the lead
According to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center, 38% of millennials (born 1981-1992 by the survey’s standards) have tattoos and over half of that group have more than one. Of Generation X, born 1965-1980, 32% have tattoos, more than double that of the Baby Boomers and more than five times the Silent Generation. (Members of Generation Z were underage at the time of the survey and were not counted.)
Of Billboard’s top ten musical acts in 2018, seven have visible tattoos. Post Malone, who sits at number two on the list, has several face tattoos, as did the number seven artist, the late rapper XXXTentacion.
Mr. McQuade said he won’t work on anyone’s face “unless your life is already completely ruined.” Similarly, the only way you can get him to tattoo your hands is by having an arm covered in ink.
It’s hard to say exactly when tattoos became popular culture. In the ‘00s, tattoos on influential figures like soccer superstar David Beckham, popstar Adam Levine and actress Angelina Jolie became iconic parts of their looks.
When Cosimo Liberto was a teenager, he would skateboard along East Carson Street and see tattoo artists covered in ink, standing outside their shops and smoking.
He said he would think, “Wow, those are the coolest guys ever.” Mr. Liberto, now 40, has been tattooing professionally for 13 years
and works at Carson Street Tattoo.
He got his first tattoo at 13, when the shops were mostly filled with bikers. “It definitely wasn’t soccer moms then,” he said. When the TV show “Miami Ink” came along, though, he saw a shift. Now, the average client could be anyone from a doctor to a gangster.
“Miami Ink,” which ran from 2005 to 2008, brought a lifestyle once contained to tattoo parlors into the living rooms of all sorts of people, and was successful enough to launch spinoffs like “L.A. Ink” and “N.Y. Ink.”
The show also inspired Mr. Liberto’s apprentice, 25-yearold Laura Clift of Lawrenceville. She grew up with an artistic background, and seeing tattoo artists on TV showed her how personal the formcould be.
“I like the challenge of staying focused and being precise,” she said.
Her first canvas was Mr. Liberto, who now has over 200 tattoos, including on his scalp, face and hands. He said he doesn’t regret a single one, though he’s had a few girls’ initials covered up. His current favorite: a scythe above his forehead, the blade of which dips into his brow and drips blood. “Usually, my favorite tattoo is my latest tattoo,” he said.
The mainstream acceptance of tattoos is good for business, Mr. Liberto said, but like Mr. McQuade, he misses the days when the scene was niche and when it had an edge.
Working in a chair adjacent to Mr. Liberto, Nick Corcoran, 30, was getting ready to give Marquis Grogan, 16, of Mon Valley, his first tattoo. But up first was Grogan’s 6year-old cousin.
After a couple of minutes in the chair, she was showing off a small heart on her right forearm — done in temporary ink, of course.
“You gotta make it fun for the kids for their first time in the tattoo shop,” Mr. Corcoran, a Brentwood resident, said.
For Mr. Flores, who came to the Southside via Houston, Texas, ink is the same as any material accessory.
“It’s no different than getting a Louis Vuitton bag or a Fendi purse,” Mr. Flores said.
The on/off thing
The rise in tattoos also means big business for tattoo removal. The company Disappearing Ink, which specializes in tattoo removal, has expanded from their original Penn Hills location all the way to Honolulu.
Ian South, who works as a technician for Disappearing Ink’s Lawrenceville office, said he’s done removals for all types of reasons. “The common denominator is the desire to change or improve something about yourself,” Mr. South said.
The typical client is usually a woman between 20 and 40 years old, South said, “But then we have outliers on both sides of that, and we’ve lasered everyone from nuns to Nazis here.”
One father reached out to them with a request to remove a swastika tattoo from his chest. “He emailed us and said, ‘Please help me get this hate off my body,’” Mr. South recalled. The man was ashamed, unsure of how to explain the symbol to his young daughter. When the procedure was done, the daughter came in and wrapped him in a warm hug.
One of Mr. South’s closest collaborators is a Pittsburgh artist who is listed as a favorite among many of his peers: Don McDonald, the Penn Hills artist who owns the Bodyworks tattoo shop. “A legend,” Mr. South called him. Mr. Flores listed McDonald as one of his idols.
“That’s a real honorable position to hold, and I take it seriously,” Mr. McDonald said of his status in the Pittsburgh tattoo scene.
Twenty-seven years ago, Mr. McDonald began his tattoo career as a young artist at Bodyworks. At the time, he was doing a bit of everything. Over the years, he developed his own style of biomechanical artwork, aesthetically influenced by the “Alien” movie franchise with its mix of mechanical textures and organic features, like a metal exoskeleton or a brain with pistons.
Mr. McQuade, a friend of Mr. McDonald’s, said of the style, “There’s like two guys in the world who really do it well,” and Mr. McDonald is one of them.
At the time that he was starting, Mr. McDonald began to see tattoo art expand from its traditional roots into more experimental, abstract styles.
“As the styles changed, I think it started to appeal to more people,” he said. “40 years ago, it was more military, outlaw, bikers — it was seen as more of a lowbrow kind of thing.” Now, people from every walk of life can find a style that appeals to them.
Thirty years ago, walking into a tattoo shop felt quite different for Mr. McDonald than it does today.
“You would walk into a tattoo shop, and be like, ‘Oh my god, everyone here is crazy.’ And all of these guys would be like, ‘Yeah, we probably are crazy,’ ” he said. “Overall, to be honest though, it really is cool. It really is cool to see everyone getting it.”
More than anything, Mr. McDonald expressed joyful surprise that tattoo culture has grown far beyond what he ever imagined. “Tattooing on television,” he said with a laugh. “Like, you gotta be kidding.”