Becoming a Female Tattoo Artist: One Woman's Story
In 1989, seventeen-year-old Stephanie Parker gets in her own boyfriend’s car, slamming the door behind her. A grizzled tattoo artist, a carbon copy of everybody she sees employed in and around London, has given her the brush-off she receives everywhere when she asks to apprentice with him. It’s just like the same wrinkled old guy inside a Black Flag t-shirt just travels from shop to shop to offer her the party line: “This industry isn’t designed for women.” The man doesn’t even bother to start her portfolio.
Tattoo School
A lot more than two decades pass. She getsmarried and divorced, married again, and contains several kids. Between changing diapers and filling bottles, tattoos appear on her arms. Though she draws, refinishes and paints a table occasionally, she never forgets the sensation of loss she felt when she shut that car door and stopped asking to turn into a tattoo apprentice.
“[Nothing else] felt completely right…my dream about tattooing was hidden away inside a dusty filing cabinet inside my heart, locked up, and I genuinely think it is there to stay,” she says.
Become a Tattoo Artist
Like lots of women, Stephanie internalized your message that girls didn’t belong in the industry or perhaps plain weren’t good enough. An artist in England told her flat-out that he’d never seen a female tattoo artist, and this a female “wouldn’t be able to hack the apprenticeship.” A quick look at her portfolio today, loaded with Technicolor skulls, comic-style Star Wars characters, and delicate dragonflies shows she’s planning to place it to each and every dude who’s ever told her “no.”
Stephanie found A.R.T. by accident on Facebook, as well as the filing cabinet that held her long-lost dream eased open. Thanks to a fundraiser suggested by her husband, she signed on for her apprenticeship through the help of relatives and buddies.
“People I hadn’t seen in decades---old friends from secondary school who said they’d remembered me speaking about the way i wanted to turn into a tattoo artist-donated to my fundraiser,” she says. “It meant so much to me that I had made this kind of impression all of the years ago.”
Though it took twenty-5 years for Stephanie to begin her hands-on training, she’s finally working as an apprentice in a real tattoo shop. The curly-haired highschool girl from such a long time ago has the opportunity to follow her calling, and she says she can’t wait to compensate for lost time.
“Coming to 'school' inside an actual tattoo shop gets you inside the thick of it all…every day I go to the shop eager to learn and ready to strive,” she says. “I’m itching to have my practical a tattoo machine! ”