No longer taboo for women, tattoos are the new cover-up

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No longer taboo for women, tattoos are the new cover-up
October 8, 2010
Leslie Scrivener
thestar.com

Pauline Zahalan, in her middle years, is a garden of visible tattoos. A curled-up cat and chrysanthemum cover one arm in a water colour-like wash; koi fish and water lilies curve around her right leg.

“I remember when the Spice Girls were popular, and how brave I thought Sporty Spice was to have an arm band tattoo,” says the smooth faced 54-year-old grandmother, wearing black boots and a smock, her hair a dramatic play of black and white.

Back then, Zahalan didn't feel comfortable exposing her own ink. She often wore long sleeves to cover her arms, which she had tattooed when she was about 40. Otherwise she'd be harassed: “Are you a truck driver?” strangers would ask. Or they'd say: “You're so pretty, why do you have tattoos?” Or leer: “Where else do you have them?”

Twenty years ago, she says, tattooing was a boys club rite usually associated with bikers. “It took all my courage when I first went in (to a parlour),” recalls Zahalan, who studied art at the University of Toronto. “It was intimidating with all those guys.”

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that she became the founder of Toronto's first women-owned tattoo studio, Yonge Street Tattoos, a storefront with exposed brick, aquariums, plants and ochre coloured walls that opened in 1997.

Now Sporty Spice's Celtic knot is as common as a soccer mom's seahorse on the ankle or bluebird above the bra line. Hardly worth noticing.

What is noticeable, though, is that tattoos on women have become super-sized and sprawling.

Women are now courted as consumers of boldly visible tattoos — full displays of Tim Burton or Where the Wild Things Are characters, cherry blossoms, angel wings that span shoulder blades, dragons that dive down the spine, and peonies, daisies, butterflies and roses running riot over entire bodies.

“We've seen the explosion of tattoo enthusiasm, and women are at the forefront,” says Michael Atkinson, a University of Toronto professor with an interest in ethnography. “Far more women are being tattooed than ever before in history.”

Some may see the tattoos as a fad. “But I think it's deeper than being trendy,” says filmmaker Andrew Gregg, whose documentary Tattoo Odyssey will be broadcast on Bravo! on Sunday night. He investigates the meaning of tattoos among the shamans of the Mentawai people of Indonesia and lovers of ink in Toronto. “Once people get a tattoo, they do feel changed,” observes Gregg. “Some kind of shift happens. People say: ‘That's me, now. I'm more me than I was before.' ”

Andrea Ficaro has a full “sleeve” tattoo of roses and breaking waves moving up her left arm and culminating in a storm on her shoulder. At her wrist is her personal motto, “sink or swim;” on her back, the name of her much-loved teenage cousin, Francesca.

Each of the tattoos says something about her, says Ficaro, 24, who works as an admissions officer for an online university. The roses, which open up as they rise up her arm, are symbols of growth. Water nourishes the flowers, she explains. The storm is a reference to her journey from teenager to young adult.

She sees the tattoos as empowering. “I'm always looking out for other people,” she says. “This is a gift to me. Something to say, ‘Good job, Andrea.' ”

On Queen St. W., Molly Littleton, 22, chases her toddler while her boyfriend is being tattooed at TCB Tattoos.

Littleton is a tiny woman with jet black hair who has “word nerd” tattooed on her knuckles. She likes to read, she explains.

At her collarbone she's got a series of daisies. On her arm, an impressive, not yet complete image of Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! She thought her daughter, Audrey, who's not yet 2, would like the picture. “It's a way of having things that are pretty or cute with you,” she says.

Some women see tattoos simply as body art. The significance is no more than the beauty of the image itself, says Zahalan — “I just like the look of it.” She notes that many tattoo artists come from art school or graphic design backgrounds, as she does.

Atkinson, however, sees commerce more than art. He says tattoos are products of a highly individualized consumer-based culture. “The middle class has transformed it into a marketing opportunity,” he says.

He describes the perfect storm of opportunity in recent decades — advances in women's rights, a blurring of gender roles and a decline in the influence of religion — that's led to a greater tolerance for tattoos. From the women's movement: “There's the sense that ‘this is my body, I have control over it and if I want to engage in what has been a traditionally masculine activity, I can.' ”

There's been a corresponding erosion in the belief, expressed in various faiths, that the “body is a temple,” not to be desecrated.

At the same time, he says, young people strive to show they are different from others and express their singularity by buying something they see as unique to them: a tattoo.

As well, women tattoo artists started working in the 1990s, and there was a shift in tattoo shop location and style, says Atkinson. “They moved from the back alley to Queen St.; they started calling them studios, not parlours.”

Atkinson, who lives near Burlington, describes a suburban mini-mall. “You can eat at East Side Mario's and then go and get a tattoo.”

Mark Prata, who opened a Danforth Rd. tattoo studio, Toronto Ink, three years ago, is reorganizing his shop to attract more female customers, so he's including a laser studio for both hair and tattoo removal (women are more likely to change their minds about their ink).

“If you look in magazines, in Europe, women have a lot of really big tattoos,” he says. “Here in North America, women are picking smaller pieces and getting a collage. I'm trying to show them that it's always better to go for a bigger drawing.”

He notes that when celebrities tattoo, women follow. Rihanna gets stars; girls come in asking for stars (you have to be 18 to be tattooed in Ontario, or 16 with parental permission). Rihanna gets a script tattoo; girls want script. Megan Fox has lettering on her rib cage . . . and so on.

The mother goddess of celebrities, Angelina Jolie, has many tattoos and you might well think some of them, especially the box of script on her upper arm, are the UN charter of rights. They are instead the latitude and longitude of the places her children were born, and they replace the dragon tattoo, since lasered off, with the name of her former husband, Billy Bob Thornton. (Lasers don't fully remove traditional tattoos, which is why people often ink over them.)

Television series such as Miami Ink and LA Ink, and reality stars such as Kat Von D., provide models of successful tattooed artists, says Zahalan. Von D. “shows it's cool to be female and tattooed. We see her looking great, as opposed to sleazy, so there's been a shift in how we perceive people with tattoos.”

Despite their popularity, tattoos still have a defined acceptance — just try needling a snake on your neck and then looking for a job on Bay St. And as a woman named Devon, who opted for a lower-back tattoo, told Atkinson when he was conducting his research on women and ink: “The only thing that kept going through my mind was, ‘What about my wedding dress?' There's no way in hell that I could see myself standing at the altar . . . with a fat tattoo of a heart stuck up there on my bare arm. That would look so tacky.”

A Texas Tech University survey found that about 25 per cent of 18- to 25-year-olds have tattoos. But women are twice as likely as men to have a tattoo removed, researcher Myrna Armstrong found. “They were removing them because of negative comments,” she says.

“But what you also find in removal clinics is that they still like the tattoo, but weren't happy with the placement, or it didn't turn out the way they wanted ... ”

There's a hangover sensibility that tattoos are “disrespectable,” says Atkinson, 39, who has two full sleeves and a chest tattoo. The old thinking is that it's dirty, an unhygienic practice used by risk takers. “It's (seen as) present-centred, impulsive behaviour — you're not thinking about long-term consequences.”

At a recent promotional party at a downtown bar, Zahalan found guests who won gift certificates for free tattoos were reluctant to accept them. “I think tattoos are fabulous and desirable but there are still some who think they are awful and ugly.”

A 23-year-old University of Toronto history student who's also a maître d' at a four-star restaurant has tattoos on her hips, wrist, bicep, the backs of her thighs and inner lip. Inner lip? It was a “stupid” dare, from a time when she had a barbecue and ate hot dogs, which are the very words inked on her inner lip, she says.

Placement or concealment is strategic — when she wears her navy suit with opaque tights to work, no one can see her tattoos. “I enjoy my job and look forward to advancement,” she says, asking that her name not be used because her workplace doesn't tolerate tattoos. “I don't want anything that can be seen as professionally compromising. I'm not going to tattoo my knuckles until I'm sure I'm going to be stuck in a minimum-wage job for the rest of my life.”

Another twist in the tattoo game: young women with visible tattoos report that men tend to forget the usual boundaries on the street or on dates. “Guys think girls are more bad-assed, hot and kinky when they have tattoos,” one says.

“Are you?”

“No, I'm very sensitive.”

Barry Williams, 44, has the muscular build of a former competitive swimmer. Wearing a white shirt, his dark hair short, the friendly-faced internal auditor for a bank is agreeable to discussing his views of tattooed women on a subway ride on the Yonge line.

“One tattoo is okay, two starts looking dirty,” says Williams, who sports a small red maple leaf tattoo on his own shoulder.

“It's engrained in your thinking that women with tattoos are hard. Now I can see that they can be tasteful, and if you do have one it should reflect who you are. But too many tattoos, a full sleeve? You look rough.

“Like a bad girl.”

Filmmaker Gregg sees full-sleeve tattooed women differently. “I think it's amazing. It can be really sexy. Somebody has made that decision. It's a show of personal strength and confidence — ‘I'm getting what I want.' ”

n memory: I just think how my heart is broken and always will be

Her shoulder tattoo is of double broken hearts with falling tears — one heart for her son, Corp. Mike Seggie, who died on Sept. 3, 2008 at the age of 21, and another for her daughter Kimberly, who had died in an automobile accident in 1990 when she was 17.

“I didn't really like tattoos,” says Shirley Seggie from Winnipeg, “but my son was killed in Afghanistan and 30 or 35 of his friends got tattoos. Then, when my family members got them, I got one in his memory. I just think how my heart is broken and always will be.”

“I did it to honour my kids . . . I would not have a tattoo otherwise,” says Seggie, 57.

Memorial tattoos, poignant and indelible reminders of those who have died, are increasingly common in military families. Some fathers have full portraits of their sons on their chests or sides. They look in the mirror every morning and see their child's image.