White people are sorry about racism so now my spite tattoo is pointless?
This week, non-black people have finally realized the black people around them are actually human. It turns out we were actually making sense this entire time. We weren’t just making this shit up. Personally, that has caused a number of well-intentioned white people from my past to interpretive dance their way into my DMs with apologies. They’re sorry about some misunderstanding or blatantly racist thing they did in the past.
They finally realize I wasn’t some big mean black lady bully, but a frustrated person calling them out on some racist shit. And I guess it would feel good, ifI still centered my energies on convincing non-black people of my humanity, but it’s hard to care now. Still, some of these apologies have been years in the making. There was certainly a time when my energy was fully focused on proving these people wrong. One of the apologies I received was from an argument that occurred all the way back in 2016. An argument that made me so angry, I put together an entire project and got a revenge tattoo.
Now, four years later, the perpetrator of this offense has come back into my inbox to apologize. It’s odd, because I actually had been thinking of our clash recently. Back in the day, when I lived in Chicago, there was this incredibly cool, artsy tattoo shoppe. It was a Tattoo Shoppe; as in, you could only get a tattoo with a pre-booked appointment. Also, they only did tattoos that were their original artwork and would only do them for a limited number of people. They were artists. Not like your regular tattoo places, they were a femme-queer-diversity-safe-space-focused new age tattoo shop. They were celebrated on social media and in local press.
In order to get one of the unique designs offered on their website, people had to apply. Since it was so hard to get a tattoo there, you had to rely on Instagram to get a sense of their work. I scrolled and scrolled and only saw tattoos on white people. Eventually, I started to realize all the designs I saw on their website were pretty much exclusively on white bodies. As a woman of color, I typically want to find an artist who has a portfolio of clients in diverse shades so I know they have the skills to consider color and shading for anyone darker than mayo.
I knew black people who had applied, but none who’d ever actually been selected. I decided to look into the application process myself. In order to apply, you had to submit a photo of the area to be tattooed. The website stated “paper-like” shades were preferred. Oh. So…not black people and certainly not darkskinned black people. I reached out to the tattoo artist who posted this and was given a litany of excuses. “Tattooing darker skin requires different shading and changes my art, I only do original pieces and I can’t adapt them” and “it’s harder to photograph dark skin, so I can’t put them in my portfolio.” And sure, plenty of people have talked about how tattooing dark skin requires an expanded set of skills, but those are skills artists at a shop that claimed to be diverse should have.
The owner and I argued back and forth on Instagram for hours before I eventually gave up. She believed it was her artistic right to submit her clients to a brown paper bag test. At the time, she didn’t understand how frustrating and wrong that was to black clients. Why not just…do better instead of excluding entire shades of people? The next day, the owner started bombarding the shop’s Instagram with images of slightly-not-white people of color to prove I was wrong. Suddenly, her feed was filled with 4–6 year old tattoos of the same 2–3 lightskinned women of color. This was supposed to prove to me that she embraced diversity. I pointed out that it was just more evidence of the colorism at play. Maybe she rushed to embrace women of color of a certain shade, but wouldn’t do that same work for darkskinned people. At that point, she stopped replying to my comments.
I was now enraged. I could leave it alone before, but I couldn’t stand her willful ignorance of colorism. How could this person think those pictures addressed my point? I had to prove her wrong. I’m an Aries moon, after all. Oddly enough, another tattoo artist I followed on Instagram was making his way to Chicago. I’d been obsessed with his work for awhile and it just so happened he was doing guest bookings at the very tattoo shop I’d called out. I wanted a tattoo from him for years. It also didn’t hurt that I had an ulterior motive: I absolutely knew the shop would rush to put my lightskinned ass black tattooed arm up on their Instagram page as proof of their diverse clientele. I’d use my own tattoo to prove the hypocrisy of their colorist policies and point out that it was a guest artist who’d done the tattoo and I still hadn’t passed their shade test. It was a spite tattoo (that was also carefully designed and something I actually wanted for awhile, I’m not an idiot. I’m just a Sagittarius.).
The day of the appointment, the owner was there. We didn’t say anything and I wasn’t even entirely sure if she knew who I was. I’d mentioned to my tattoo artist that something had come up with the shop owner and colorism on Instagram, but he didn’t think much of it. I wanted my moment of spite, so I didn’t push him on it. Also, he’s like, an absolutely amazing artist, like, I really wanted this tattoo. Two hours later, it was done and it was beautiful. It was everything I wanted and I smiled with glee when the shop owners rushed to take pictures of my still red and swollen arm. Before I even finished my Uber ride, the tattoo artist was texting me a screenshot of the shop’s Instagram feed. There was my lightskinned ass arm.
With that evidence, I set out to further prove my point because I’m a Scorpio rising. I decided I’d pitch a piece to some publication about colorism in the tattoo industry and show that even supposedly queer and diverse shops were eager to highlight lightskinned people like me, but failed most black people. I’d also include photographs of my many tattooed friends, shot by some of my favorite photographers. I put together multiple photo shoots and made a Facebook group for people to submit their own pictures. I even shot some people myself. The most frustrating part of the entire thing was that this shop owner had told me there wasn’t enough demand and it was just too hard for her to learn to tattoo and photograph darkskinned people. She acted as though it was impossible. I wanted people to see just how possible it was.
But, I couldn’t get anyone to pick up the pitch. It was 2016 and the topic hadn’t really started trending yet. Or, white people didn’t care yet. Most people thought, well, she has a right to tattoo what she wants on who she wants. I got tired of white editors’ indifference and let the piece go. Four years went by. I lost most of the photos from the project when my old laptop died.
Now, there are finally mainstream conversations about colorism in the tattoo industry and more tattoo artists who focus on darkskinned clients are being celebrated. Also, that tattoo shop is closed. And even though it had been four years, it still felt good to get an apology. It felt good to have someone acknowledge, even after all these years, that I wasn’t crazy for caring about this. It felt good to see that someone had actually taken in what I said. I wasn’t just making this shit up. It felt good to be seen.
