'White supremacy colors everything, even art': Tattoo artists of color battle narrative

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Sezin Koehler had the perfect tattoo in mind. She imagined blue and purple swirls rising up her arm to match the colorful tattoos adorning her shoulders. After hours of planning and research, she brought her idea to a tattoo artist.

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The artist took one look at her and said no.

“Your skin tone is a problem,” she remembers the artist telling her.

Koehler, 42, went to multiple artists, who said her skin was too dark to be tattooed in color. They suggested black and gray, even though Koehler already had blue and purple tattoos.

Each time, Koehler left the tattoo shops crying.

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Artists should be able to paint on any canvas,” said Koehler, a Sri Lankan and Lithuanian American culture writer from southeast Florida. “And if you can’t, there’s the internet, books, networks of artists that can teach you. If you wanted to learn, you could. So the fact is they're making a choice that they only want certain kinds of people to tattoo. And that is racist. There's no excuse for it."

Racism manifests itself in the tattoo industry in different ways, experts told USA TODAY. Tattoo artists of color point to discriminatory hiring practices, racist or culturally appropriative imagery in tattoo designs, wage disparity, and a lack of respect given to tattoo artists of color.

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As the industry faces internal calls to reckon with its own whiteness, many artists point to one major issue: a pervasive opinion that the ideal skin color to tattoo is white. Despite deep histories of tattooing in communities of color, tattoo artists say, this myth persists, revealing racism and colorism within the industry. 

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Several artists of color told USA TODAY that tattooing darker skin is different from tattooing lighter shades. Darker skin often scars more easily, requiring the artist to shift to different areas and be gentler. Colors may also show up differently on darker skin, and layered color tattoos can take longer.

But claims that dark skin cannot be tattooed in color or in certain styles requiring more detail are false, the artists said.

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DeGuzman said it’s the tattoo artist’s job to educate themselves on all skin tones.

When tattoo artists aren’t trained in tattooing darker skin, she said, they turn away clients, leaving them traumatized and perpetuating the “ideal skin tone myth.” Many artists and clients refer to that behavior as "skin shaming," a microaggression.

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Koehler said that as a result of to skin shaming, she no longer goes to white tattoo artists and spends more time researching artists to see if they tattoo people of color.

“I'm just not going to risk being talked to like that anymore,” she said.

An artist who does fine-line, detail work, DeGuzman said many of her clients have also been turned away by other white artists who say detailed tattoos are impossible on darker skin.

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Quiara Capellan, an Afro Latina tattoo artist in Brooklyn, New York, said her clients of color often feel shy asking her for colorful and detailed tattoos because of their experiences with white artists.

“When an artist says they can’t do it, it’s just that they don’t know how to do it,” she said. “And it’s not a reflection on the client. It’s a reflection on the artistry and skill level of the artist. There’s tons of artists who work on darker skin and know how to do color and detail work on those skin tones."

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Tattoo magazines, media and TV shows perpetuate the narrative that white skin is ideal for tattooing, said Tyrone Cooley, a Black tattoo artist and owner of Tri-Cities Tattoo Company in Atlanta.

On the tattoo show “Ink Master,” artists often avoid tattooing darker skin. In the show’s ninth season, one contestant said: “That’s the one I wanted the least. How are you at tattooing really dark skin like that?” In the same season, a contestant referred to a “skin tone issue” with a Black couple.

“White supremacy colors everything, even art,” Cooley said. “They may not be conscious of the fact that they’re being racist, but it’s been hard-wired into them. That’s how racism in America often works.”

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The roots of tattooing are within Black and brown communities, Koehler said.

She said modern tattooing in the U.S. was co-opted from its roots in many Indigenous spiritual and cultural practices, and tattooing runs centuries deep in the histories of countries such as India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Japan, Egypt, Morocco, Ethiopia and many others.

“The industry is marginalizing the same people they stole these practices from,” she said.

Colonizers often showed a preference for lighter skin tones and embedded colorism into the countries they colonized, Koehler said.

This idea of whiteness being the "default" has continued today in the tattoo industry and is often the default skin tones for emojis, crayons and Band-Aids, said Kandace Layne, a tattoo artist at the Queen Bee Tattoo Parlour in Marietta, Georgia.

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