The first six months Aimee Palomino held her job as a graphic designer at construction company S.D. Deacon Corp., she kept her tattoos hidden, as she had at her job interview. But at the office Christmas party, an apprehensive Palomino decided to show up with a spaghetti-strap dress that put her chest and arm tattoos on display.
The response surprised her, starting with Steve Deacon, the Northeast Portland company's middle-aged chief executive officer, who walked up to her.
“He said, 'Well, Aimee, how long have you had those, and why have you been keeping them from us?'” Palomino recalls. “It was like I opened a present in front of everybody.”
It's largely a generational thing, and Portland is full of young people, but knowledgeable folks both within and outside the body-art industry seem pretty sure that Portland has more tattooed and pierced residents per capita than any city in the country. And no, you can't classify this in the Keep Portland Weird category — for those under, say, 40, tattoos have become very mainstream, crossing all sorts of political lines.
For decades, San Francisco was considered the country's mecca for body art, but that's changed, says Jeff Johnson, co-owner of Sea Tramp Tattoo Co. in Southeast Portland and author of “Tattoo Machine.”
Johnson says that over the past decade, tattoo artists from up and down California, but especially the Bay Area, have been flooding into Portland. Johnson says the result has been “a weird renaissance” in Portland.
Forest Grove connection
The tattoo-oriented trend also branched out to the suburbs — even the more rural reaches of the tri-county area.
Forest Grove, where 24-year-old Ryan Burke opened Tattoo Asylum in February, is a good example. The western Washington County city of 21,000 has welcomed Burke's business with open arms — and legs and chests, too.
“I've done tattoos for people who just turned 18, and I just tattooed someone who's 70 the other day,” said Burke, whose tidy shop is located on Pacific Avenue next to a children's used clothing store. “He wanted a lizard.”
Burke admits that opening his business in the throes of a recession was a bit risky, but so far, he says, there's no shortage of skin to go under the needle. That's because he and his partner, Bertrand DeBrug, give people fair deals on quality body art.
“We specialize in doing pretty much any kind of tattoo — any request that walks in the door,” Burke said. “I'd say we're mostly a custom tattoo shop.”
Burke got his first tattoo — a likeness of cartoon character Johnny the Homicidal Maniac — at 19 and “enjoyed the whole process,” he said. So much that he's since acquired “13 or 14” more tattoos.
A couple years back he started training to become a licensed tattoo artist, which, in Oregon, means an apprentice must take 360 hours of classes. Burke also completed 150 hours of actual tattooing at Forbidden Body Art in Northeast Portland.
He's earned his official paperwork from the Oregon Health Licensing Association.
It isn't Burke's desire to inflict pain on his tattoo customers, but he tells them up front that some discomfort is just part of the process.
“We basically tell people we're going to do a small area first and see how they do,” Burke said. “I haven't had anybody quit because of the pain … but it's true that it's a factor.”
If a client wants a larger body part tattooed — such as a “sleeve” on a forearm or a longitudinal design down the side – Burke and DeBrug take things slow. “We'll ask them to make several appointments,” Burke noted.
Most folks adopt a stiff-upper-lip attitude about the sting of tattooing.
“It's fairly tolerable,” said Burke. “In my mind it's more like an annoyance.”
What tattoo design has Burke been most proud of? “Nos Sertatu, a vampire from an old black-and-white movie,” he said.
What's the most difficult design he's attempted?
“Believe it or not, it's a circle,” Burke said. “The hardest thing to do is a perfect circle. Remember that it's on the skin, and the skin is a breathing, moving thing.”
More tattoo shops
A city-by-city survey of tattoo shop listings bears out Portland's standing. San Francisco has a population of about 808,000 and 70 tattoo shops listed in its Yellow Pages. Portland's population is 580,000 and it has 73 shops. Seattle has only 40 shops and Phoenix 36. Los Angeles lists 167 shops, but its population of 9.8 million is more than 10 times that of Portland. On a per-capita basis, Portland has far and away more tattoo shops than any major city in the country.
A 2008 Harris poll confirmed what people in the tattoo industry have known for years — that tattooing is much more entrenched on the West Coast than anywhere else in the country. Nationally, 14 percent of U.S. residents say they have at least one tattoo, but 20 percent of West Coast residents admit to one.
The Harris poll breaks down tattoos by age, and 25- to 29-year-olds have the highest national rate, at about one in three. People 30 to 39 are just a little behind. Males and females are about evenly split. And surprisingly, or maybe not, Democrats, Republicans and independents all admit to tattoos at about the same rate.
Blue collar roots
But not everybody is buying into the Harris numbers, especially not as they apply to people under 40 and living in Portland.
Mike Perrotti, president of Black Cat Plumbing in Southeast Portland, says he's got a fairly diverse set of friends and work acquaintances, most under 40, and he estimates three of four have at least one tattoo.
Perrotti, 39, has tattoos up and down his arms and legs. And he says that in Portland, tattoos for those under 40 have little to do with the so-called young creative class. Tattoos, he says, were in fashion among people wearing blue collars long before they became popular with young creatives.
“Walk onto a job site and say, 'Who's got tattoos?' and everyone's got one,” Perrotti says.
New Orleans native Thomas Dunklin, 33, is head chef at the Red Star Tavern downtown. His tattoos reflect his food and cultural heritage — a giant crawfish with corn and lemon on one arm, and on his stomach is a pig roasting on a spit.
In Portland kitchens, Dunklin estimates, about one in three cooks are tattooed. And, he adds, the right tattoos establish a little kitchen street cred, too.
“It's almost like a rite of passage,” he says.
Jeff Kish, co-owner of Rock n' Rose Clothing on East Burnside Street, worked as a tattoo artist for seven years in California before moving to Portland. He's convinced that, while more San Franciscans may have elaborate body art and more residents immersed in a tattoo subculture, tattoos are more mainstream here, with more people overall having at least one.
About a third of Kish's body is covered with tattoos. In addition, he's had his tongue split and Teflon ball implants placed under the skin of his forearms. For some, that's a bit much.
“I've been places where I've worn long sleeves because I wasn't sure how people would react,” Kish says. “I don't have to worry about that here.”
Kish estimates that nine out of 10 young people walking by his store on East Burnside have at least one tattoo.
Of course, it's one thing to get a tattoo, and another to get a job. But Kish says it's easier for tattooed people to find work here than anywhere else he's lived.
Blake Perlingieri, who owns Nomad piercing studio on Southeast Division Street, says he gets a resume a day from a piercer moving to Portland.
“This is the new San Francisco,” Perlingieri says. As for jobs, Perlingieri says that when he had a shop in Central Oregon, one of his most popular items was a plug that allows pierced people to hide holes in their eyebrows or nostrils. Most were for people who needed to adapt to company dress codes. But in Portland, he hasn't sold a “hide it” in over a year.
Another Portland phenomenon, Perlingieri says, is piercing for devout Christians.
“The same people who spit on me when I went to see 'The Last Temptation of Christ' 20 years ago are now my clients,” he says. “I've never seen so many modified Jesus freaks as there are here.”
'Nobody cares'
Perlingieri's sister, graphic designer Chemynne Perlingieri, sports tattoos as well as ear “plugs” in her stretched ear lobes. She believes Portland is more tolerant than San Francisco.
“In San Francisco, no one would ever say to you, 'We don't like your ear plugs,' but they might look at you differently. I've lived here not quite a year, but nobody cares.”
Chemynne Perlingieri says she was in the Safeway on Southeast Powell Boulevard one day when she saw a cashier with large ear plugs and a poem tattooed up her arm.
“I couldn't believe she was ringing up my groceries, and I thought, 'Ah, Portland,'” Perlingieri says.
Rebecca Morrison-Stone, who runs temp agency Advantage Staffing, says there are still many jobs here that are unattainable for visibly tattooed workers, especially in corporate offices, and especially as the job market has tightened in the past year and a half.
Most company human resources managers see themselves doubling as risk managers, Morrison-Stone warns, and don't want to mess with a worker who might complain about discrimination down the line.
Brian Garcia, a phlebotomist at Oregon Health & Science University, has tattoos over much of his body, including his arms and a tattoo ring on one finger. Garcia knows hospital policy dictates that tattoos be covered if possible. He wears a lab coat when he's drawing blood from patients, but mostly, he says, because he doesn't want to risk getting blood on his arms.
When he's working the front counter at the blood lab, Garcia says, he often wears short sleeves. And one of his fellow OHSU phlebotomists has hand tattoos. Neither of them has had a problem at work, Garcia says.
Tattoo ethic
Jeff Johnson thinks that Portland's vibrant arts community has helped foster its tattoo ethic. In fact, he says, they often go hand in hand.
“One of the interesting things about Portland is, go into a tattoo shop and you will see sculptures or paintings almost all over the place,” Johnson says. “Almost all of these people have their tattooing to support another art form that they're really interested in. If you go to Pittsburgh, you don't see that.”
And that's why San Francisco is still the true mecca for tattoo artists, says Jason Kundell, owner of Art Work Rebels on Northwest 23rd Avenue.
Kundell fits Johnson's profile of the new Portland tattoo artist — he ran an established shop in the Bay Area before moving here to raise a family. He's certainly pleased that so many Portlanders want tattoos, but he also says the overall level of tattoo art here isn't yet close to what it is in San Francisco, where, instead of Johnson's part-time artists, the shops are dominated by tattooists renowned and sought after for their skin work.
Still, Kundell agrees with Johnson that the local tattoo scene is becoming more sophisticated, and he says that Portland has another advantage over most cities — the weather. He likes the skin he's working on here, greatly due to the cooler weather and lack of sun.
Tattoos here, Kundell says, look brighter and don't fade as much.
Research ties multiple tattoos, risky behavior
Tattoos may be going mainstream, but what about the behavior of people with tattoos? That's what Jerome Koch and his Body Art Team at the Texas Tech University sociology department wanted to find out.
Koch and colleagues have been studying the habits of people with tattoos for a decade. And for a decade, they have mostly found no correlation between people having body art and out-of-the-norm behavior.
So they decided to push it, surveying more than 1,700 students at four Midwestern and Southern colleges for a recently released study. They wanted to see if any level of body art corresponded with what they termed “deviant behavior.”
The team defined deviant behavior as cheating on schoolwork, seven or more sex partners in the past year, regular drug use, binge drinking and non-traffic arrests.
“We were looking for the threshold,” Koch says. They found it.
Generally, students with four or more tattoos, or seven or more piercings, or one “intimate piercing” (think private parts), were statistically more likely to engage in the defined deviant behaviors, especially drug use and getting arrested.
For example, 71 percent of students with four or more tattoos said they had been arrested at least once, compared to 8.5 percent of students with no tattoos.
On the other hand, 36 percent of tattoo-free students reported binge drinking in the past week, compared to only 29 percent of the heavily tattooed students.
Koch says there are always people who want to advertise their rebelliousness from mainstream values. They're just finding it harder to stand out from the crowd.
“Those people that are body art aficionados are being encroached upon by the rose and dolphin crowd,” Koch says. “So it takes more body art to stay on the edge.”
Portland defense attorney Matt Rizzo says the Texas Tech conclusions don't match up with what he's seeing.
“I completely disagree,” says Rizzo. “But I'm not a sociologist or a study designer.”
Rizzo, 42, has tattoos on both arms, his back and feet. The art is all covered up in court, but often on display in the office, where he's never encountered a problem. He says he knows plenty of people with multiple tattoos, and none of them are deviant, as defined by the Texas Tech study.
“I have a lot more than seven tattoos, and I wouldn't be a member of the bar if I had any of (those) behaviors,” Rizzo says.
Mike Perrotti, president of Black Cat Plumbing, says it's possible college students with multiple tattoos and piercings are different from adults with extensive body art.
“Maybe you're dealing with troubled kids who are acting out through body art,” he says.
