A change of heart, mind and skin

Photography by Yishan Chen | Blot Telisa Swan applies fresh ink to Christina Altieri, a regular at Swan Family Ink.

How the connotations behind tattoos have changed in Moscow and on the national scale

Some call it a permanent marring of the skin, others call it wearable art. Now, more often than not, people are appreciating tattooing for the art form Telisa Swan claims it is.

Swan is the founder of Swan Family Ink in Moscow. She has been tattooing for 22 years and said when she was going to college at Washington State University she originally wanted to go into advertising.

It wasn’t until she found she had a natural talent for tattooing that she even considered the profession. News of her talent spread across the area, and she suddenly had people contacting her because they wanted her to tattoo them.

“It just ended up totally snowballing,” Swan said.

IMG_1684Now she tattoos at Swan Family Ink with three other artists, including her daughter Cera Swan-Lake.

Cera has been tattooing since she was in high school — a total of 15 years. She said after watching her mother do what she loves for so long, she knew she wanted to follow in her footsteps long before she graduated high school.

“I was 12 when I knew that’s what I wanted to do,” Cera said. “I did my seventh grade job project on tattooing.”

Cera apprenticed under her mother and even spent some time working at a tattoo parlor outside of the Palouse area. She said it was a good learning experience, but what she really got out of it was that she wanted to work with her mom.

“There’s love there,” Cera said. “It’s just not the same without the family element.”

Together and with the two other artists who work there, Cera and her mom have developed a strong base of clients at Swan Family Ink. Cera said they get new customers who come in for their first tattoo, but a lot of their clients are also regulars, like Christina Altieri.

Altieri got her first tattoo from Telisa at the age of 40 and has only ever gotten tattooed from Telisa since, she said. Recently she got a flower tattoo for her son tattooed on her arm by the artist.

All of Altieri’s tattoos have some degree of meaning to her, and she said she trusts Telisa’s talent to come through and illustrate her vision.

“I think they’re beautiful,” Altieri said. “They’re art.”

Many people put a lot of thought into the tattoos they receive, some deliberating for months before finally deciding on a design they like. But that’s not the case with everyone.

Jim Taylor works as an associate professor of sociology at Ohio University and specializes in topics to do with body modification and self-harm, including tattooing. Taylor said there has been a steady reduction in the stigma against tattoos and a rise in its popularity.

The reason behind the increase in popularity comes from a variety of sources, but Taylor said it essentially boils down to a spike in the access of information through the Internet and other resources. An increase in information exchange means more people are getting knowledge about tattoos and are being exposed to more positive facts and stories about the process.

Because of this popularity, Taylor said more and more people are getting tattoos for more superficial reasons, but the numbers of people getting tattoos in general are also rising, so there are still several individuals who have deep stories behind each of their tattoos.

Hannah Quaglietta has been tattooing at Untamed Art in Moscow for almost six years and said she has seen a variety of clientele with different preferences for their tattoos. One of Quaglietta’s regular customers Gian Pastore was tattooed by her recently and said he eventually wants to be tattooed fully from the neck down, so he often just lets her pick out a design and tattoo it on him.

“I trust her,” Pastore said. “There’s a lot of stuff that she likes that I let her do.”

University of Idaho sophomore Cait Bowyer has a similar philosophy. Bowyer has gotten a total of eight tattoos professionally done from one artist since she graduated high school, and said she intends to get a lot more.

Bowyer said most of her tattoos don’t have much meaning to her, but she likes them all the same. Like Pastore and Altieri, Bowyer said she holds a lot of trust in the skill of her artist, so she will just let her artist know she’s interested in getting another tattoo and give him some vague guidelines and he will come up with a design. She said she hasn’t disliked any of his work so far.

Taylor said with the popularity of tattoos rising and the stigma against it decreasing, he is seeing a widening of the variety of demographics getting tattoos, including age. He said there is an increase in young people getting tattoos, even younger than 10 years old, but there is also a rise in people getting tattoos post-retirement.

“There is really a place for seniors and tattoos,” Taylor said.

Quaglietta said Untamed Art does usually see younger clients come in more often than they do older clients, primarily college students. The youngest client she has tattooed was 16, but she has seen 14-year-olds come in with their parents before, too.

Bowyer said she doesn’t know if she has a high pain tolerance, but none of the eight tattoos she’s received so far have hurt her.

“The first tattoo I got was on the top of my foot,” Bowyer said. “And after it was done my artist asked if it hurt and I said ‘Not really.’ And he was shocked. He didn’t believe me.”

Most of the responses Bowyer has gotten to her tattoos have been positive, she said. Some people give her weird looks, but more often she said she gets complete strangers coming up to her to tell her how much they love her tattoos.

In contrast, Altieri had to wait to get her first tattoo until she was 40 because she worked at a bank and couldn’t get one while she was employed there, she said. But now things are changing in the professional world. She said she once met with a social security worker who had full tattoo sleeves.

Telisa said the thoughts about tattooing are vastly different than they were when she started more than 20 years ago. When she opened her first shop in Palouse, Washington, she said she was almost shut down right off the bat because people didn’t want a tattoo parlor in the middle of town, let alone one run by a woman.

Quaglietta started working as an apprentice for the owner of Untamed Art right after graduating from Moscow High School. She was the first female to apprentice at the tattoo parlor, but she said being a female artist hasn’t severely impacted her career in a negative way, aside from her getting occasional creepy clients or people who think she isn’t a good artist just because she’s a woman. But she said those interactions are few and far between.

Unlike Quaglietta, Cera said she still sees people holding a prejudice against her for being a female tattoo artist. She said she will get male clients who tell her how to do her job because they don’t trust her, or she even gets people making comments about her appearance, saying she would be beautiful if she didn’t have so many tattoos.

“My tattoos make me beautiful,” Cera said. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m decorating.”

Being a female artist also has its perks though, Cera said. About 80 percent of her clients say they prefer to get their tattoos done by women, she said, because women tend to be more compassionate and gentle.

“You learn a lot about people,” Cera said. “A lot of times artists end up actually being like counselors to their clients.”

Quaglietta said she’s observed that the general prejudice around tattoos has died down slightly, but she thinks there are still a lot of people out there who think it’s sketchy or gross.

Despite the prejudice and the negative interactions, all three artists said they continue to work because of the love they have for their craft. Cera said she can’t think of anything else she would rather do than tattoo with her mom.

“What I love is when the person I tattoo looks at it for the first time and they look like the tattoo has made them more complete,” Cera said. “It’s really rewarding.”

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