By chance, I recently came across the line-up of a 2017 Italian music festival that featured a bewilderingly diverse range of music genres. I soon caught myself looking at a photo of a historic American punk rock band alongside that of a Canadian mainstream pop teen idol without at first realising the bizarreness of their appearing on the same leaflet. This initial lapse in perception was, I thought, because all were heavily tattooed. On closer inspection, of course, the difference in tattoo designs and styles, the covered body parts – knuckles, hands, necks and faces on one side but not on the other – and even the extent of ink fading over time told very distinct stories. But distinct stories aside, it was tempting to think that if the recent spread of tattoo culture has been so overpowering as to soften the (visual) differences between artists as diverse as the above, then surely the tattoo industry must have never had it so good. David C. Lane’s compelling analysis of continuity and change among tattoo workers in his The Other End of the Needle showed me how far from the truth this assumption was.

The Other End of the Needle discusses tattooists as agents of production. Unlike much of the literature in this area, Lane is not concerned with the consumption or semiotics of tattoos but looks at the other side of the economic cycle: those holding the buzzing machine, not those receiving the service. In fact, Lane goes well beyond describing the process in such flat economic terms. In a powerful account of ebbs, flows and contradictions, he offers a rich journey through what he calls ‘the social world’ of tattooists, a world built upon history and tradition, a shared cultural code, a work ethic with salient honour and hierarchy components, trade secrets passed on through personal relationships based on trust, control over tools and their distribution and elements of non-commercial exchange.

The combination of these factors, often referred to as old-school ethic, has paved the way for a distinct model of social organisation of tattoo work. Dominant therein has been the element of control, a term not frequently used by Lane, but which permeates his analysis. Control seems to assume at least three interrelated forms in Lane’s account. It is meant first as an effort, historically, to remain autonomous both from private (dependent) employment relations and from the state. Second, it is meant as oversight of the territory of tattoo work denoting a strong culture of gatekeeping. The analysis is shot through with the idea and practice of ‘paying one’s dues’: apprenticing under an established tattooist is considered the only respected way of entering the industry. Third, control is meant as distance from the rules of crude commodified exchange. This has, for instance, been historically reflected in the command of one’s equipment which until recently went as far as self-sufficiency in building and/or repairing it. Underlying all aspects is, finally, control of knowledge and of access to it. A corollary of the above is that the social world of tattooists has remained resistant to institutionalisation. There are no educational institutions: experience rather than any formal accreditation is the entry ticket to the profession. There is distance from the institutional maze created by the traditional division of labour. Finally, to the extent possible and depending on location, there is relative autonomy from law and the state; the profession has traditionally self-regulated.

Each chapter contains different storylines told by interviewed tattooists in Baltimore, Maryland. These interweave not merely to explain the hallmarks of the old-school ethic, but also to narrate how the social world it has produced, a world always negotiated but always resistant to change, is now gradually cracking under the weight of gentrification of the tattoo industry – as a cultural scene, as a profession, as an art, as a subculture. What happened within the cultural and chronological continuum to bring transformative effects and what type of transformation is being generated? How does it affect tattoo workers? I will discuss Lane’s persuasive approach to these questions while problematising aspects of it, particularly those relating to labour, worker competition and the law. My thoughts will be underpinned by the overarching idea of capitalism as a totalising force.

Below is an extract by Lane to illuminate the origins of the movement toward mainstreaming. It must be noted in advance that this represents only a small part of the broader, uneven and non-linear history of tattooing. Different parts of Lane’s book walk the reader through the period before tattooing entered the formal economy – a practice taking place aboard ships or in prisons. In the USA, tattooing started to acquire characteristics of a profession in the mid-1800s without yet losing its character as a practice related to sailors or deviants. By the late 1800s, it had turned into a practice endorsed by royalty in Europe and elites in the USA, becoming a symbol of wealth, before it returned to its familiar link with deviance by the twentieth century. The two world wars helped the revival of tattoos through their spread among the military, but the practice was not opened to the wider public just yet (e.g. DeMello Reference DeMello1995). Here is Lane:

This is a fascinating history, rife with contradictory elements. It points to the contested, fluid boundaries between tattooing as craft technique and tattooing as artistic expression. It further frames tattooing as having simultaneously spoken to opposite ideals and desires: to feminist needs and expressions of masculinity; to working-class values and middle-class affectation. Importantly, this history also bespeaks a double movement: as tattooing practices were dissolving the boundary between folkcraft and art, the aestheticisation of tattoos also opened them up to wider audiences. Related to this mass appeal was the increasing adherence by tattooists to a strict etiquette of hygiene and sterilisation, which Lane reports partly originated in the era of the Tattoo Renaissance.

For anyone remotely familiar with the dynamics of capitalism, it is not difficult to guess where this trajectory led. As outsider entrepreneurs understood the potential for profit-making, elements hitherto guarded by the tattoo community started to become distorted and knowledge started to leak. Examples range from the wild commodification of tattoo conventions to the operation of tattoo schools – widely disrespected and regarded as fraudulent by insiders – and from the disclosure of professional secrets through online videos to the availability of cheap tattoo kits for anyone to purchase on online shopping platforms. Not unexpectedly then, there came a proliferation of what the industry calls ‘scratchers’ and ‘shopless’: two categories that often overlap but are not synonymous and which roughly encompass people who have not honoured the traditions of the profession as well as untrained or self-taught outsiders working from unlicensed premises. As a result of the above processes, all elements of control listed earlier currently seem to be at best under threat and at worst fully appropriated by the forces of the market. Anyone with an internet connection can now claim to be a tattooist upon watching a training video and spending twenty pounds on a kit. Hence, the fallacy in my initial assumption that tattooists must be rolling in money.

Implied in the above short version of recent history is, of course, the recognition that consumer choice has shaped and conditioned the development of the profession. Like any profession, tattooing can only claim existence as a trade in so far as there is someone to enter into exchange with. In this respect, the moment tattooing crossed the boundary from a deviance-related practice to professional practice – the moment, in other words, that it opened itself to legitimate economic exchange – it had simultaneously tied itself to a commodity logic that could not but suck it into the circuit of capital. It is therefore difficult to argue that tattooing could have remained disinfected, especially given the tendency of capitalism to constantly expand and appropriate new territory. On this basis, it is worth highlighting a tension that appears to permeate Lane’s analysis. On the one hand, he acknowledges the interdependence between tattooing and the capitalist economy and gives a nuanced account of its transition into the mainstream and its entrepreneur-driven demystification. On the other, however, he appears to invest a lot of hope in the profession’s ability to resist market forces and praises the old-school ethic for ‘making tattoo work (…) a type of resistance to the principles of capitalism and formal rationality’ (p. 11). But while instances of resistance are indeed evident throughout the book, these alone may not be sufficient to characterise tattoo work as resistant to capital wholesale. One might therefore still wonder whether this investment risks romanticising a capitalist enterprise, attributing to it counter-hegemonic features where none exist, or whether, instead, tattoo work possesses particular characteristics that render it resistant to the logic of capital. There may be no clear-cut answer to this question, but the following offers some thoughts.

Several storylines told by tattooists in the book give a strong impression that workers in the profession value their shared cultural code and the profession’s ethic more than money making. There is no reason to doubt that; quite the opposite, a sense emerges organically from the book that the interviewed workers prioritise non-monetary elements in their work. Equally as intense, however, is a sense that day-to-day production is much grittier than individual value codes may imply, if not indeed fully submerged into a capitalist rationality. This comes through, for example, in Lane’s discussion of massification of production as well as in allusions to the competition between workers and references to rigid gatekeeping practices.

Before turning to these aspects, a preliminary note. Technically speaking, tattoo work is not part of the specifically capitalist mode of production. Tattooists, by and large, own and have control over their means of production, have resisted deskilling and do not produce surplus value for a capitalist. This does not mean that they lie outside the system of capitalist domination, which is not synonymous with the capitalist mode of production. In this respect, Lane’s note that ‘[units] of measurement like hours, wages, or salary are not relevant to the tattoo process’ and that ‘the total cost or time of [a tattoo’s] production is not reducible to standardized or uniform measures’ (p. 187) does not necessarily establish resilience to capitalist rationality. To draw a parallel to Marx’s independent handicraftsmen, tattoo workers could be seen as ‘cut up into two persons’ (Marx Reference Marx1969 [Reference Marx1863], p. 408): on the one hand, they are owners of their own means of production, effectively paying themselves wages and appropriating profit from their own capital; on the other, they are wage-labourers in relation to themselves, exploiting themselves as such. This means that non-standardised hours, wages, costs and the like do not – from a technical point of view, at least – exclude tattooists from the forces of the market or make them more resilient to capitalist rationality. On the contrary, tattooists are compelled to tailor their production processes to the needs of the market if they are to survive its pressures. Succumbing to market forces is therefore not a matter of personal choice, but of objective compulsion.

This reading is consistent with the processes of massification of production that Lane neatly summarises. When in the late nineteenth century the first tattoo shops started to open to the US public, the forces of competition pushed tattooists toward intensification of production, thereby giving rise to the electric tattoo machine, which would define the profession for the years to come. Simultaneously, the flash, namely the pre-drawn designs hung on tattoo shops’ walls, offered predictability and therefore greater control over production. Taken together, these developments have inscribed market competition in the very heart of the social organisation of tattoo work. In this part of the historical continuum, tattooists, with their capitalist hat on, introduced machinery and other innovations to cheapen and increase production in order to survive competition and maximise profit. However, competition has equally conditioned the tattooist-labourer. To draw a second parallel with Marx’s discussion of piece-wages, these enable individuality all while developing ‘a sense of liberty, independence and self-control of the labourers’ but also cementing ‘their competition one with another’ (Marx Reference Marx2013 [Reference Marx1867]), p. 388). This has come through in various parts of the book but most notably in accounts of deliberate misrepresentation of legal requirements by established tattooists to fledgling members seeking to open a shop. Perhaps it is worth reiterating, at this point, that it is commodity production itself and not individual choice that has subjected workers to these forces; worker competition is, after all, nothing but coercion exerted by the mutuality of interests in capitalist systems. Still, the fact remains that the barriers to the dominance of capital had fallen already in the context of the old-school ethic.

Similar considerations apply to tattooists’ historical mobilisation of the law, which Lane examines under the rubric of ‘legal consciousness’. The term is traditionally used to denote received understandings about legality that inform everyday conduct, thereby reproducing the law as a system of domination. While Lane makes reference to this traditional critical approach to legal consciousness as launched by Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey (Reference Ewick and Silbey1998), he mainly uses the term to refer to the authors’ narrower conception of conscious instrumentalisation of the law. Lane thus discusses the use of the law by tattooists to achieve specific aims, a conscious playing of ‘the game of the law’ (p. 106), as it were, in order to gain legal recognition, lift zoning restrictions and so forth. There is generally a rich and commendable record of legal battles in the USA which have proved decisive for the future of the profession and the security of interests of tattoo workers. However, there are two dimensions in tattooists’ practices of legal mobilisation – one agentic, the other ideological – both of which militate against the narrative of resistance to capital.

From the point of view of agency, the legal mobilisation practices described in the book appear to bear a distinctly individualistic character. Many of the historic legal battles narrated were pursued by individuals, often prominent figures in the world of tattooing, such as New Yorker tattooist Spider Webb. When asked about the possibility of a tattooists’ union, Phil Sparrow, another major figure, said:

While collective responses have often been organised through professional associations, such as the Alliance of Professional Tattooists (APT), it was lobbying rather than collective worker struggles that secured workers’ interests. Legal mobilisation has therefore reflected an entrepreneurial spirit much more than a collective ethos.

A subtler point, from an ideological perspective, is that by implicitly accepting the authority of the law, tattoo workers have affirmed and reinforced the domination of liberal legality at the broader level of society. Even as they experienced the law as an oppressive force, tattooists nevertheless utilised it to secure a legitimate place for themselves in the capitalist market. They could not reasonably be expected to do otherwise, of course. However, the disciplining effects of this movement – the leaving behind of a deviant past and incorporation into the conditions of regularised capitalist economy – sit uneasily with the idea of tattooing as resistant to capital. Perhaps the genuinely liberating part of tattooists’ relationship with the law is the rejection of state institutions implicit in their tradition of self-regulation. This too, however, comes with many caveats. Self-regulation does not defy capitalist relations. On the contrary, as the neo-Weberian tradition argues (Murphy Reference Murphy1988; Saks Reference Saks2012), it could well be directed to monopolisation of a profession’s market, closure and self-gain. Self-regulation is therefore not immune to the gravitational pull of market forces and that is, perhaps, why it has left professions unprotected from the power of the state: indeed, in the USA as in the UK, the practice has long been under attack.

As the above thoughts were still taking shape while reading through Lane’s gripping analysis, I found myself growing increasingly more ambivalent over tattooists’ rigid gatekeeping practices. While at first these practices seemed like a crude display of competitiveness and self-interest, the picture was gradually nuanced by another dimension: gatekeeping was equally as much about protecting the tattooing world from inexperienced and inept entrepreneurs laying claim to what is not theirs. It soon became clear that gatekeeping, the tight hold over the tricks of the trade or the conscious deception of outsiders, is at once an effort by old-school tattooists to survive in the capitalist market, thereby reproducing it, and to protect themselves against it, thereby rejecting it. This was just one among several intriguing contradictions in The Other End of the Needle that lend the world of tattoo workers a certain charm. Perhaps then, when all is said and done, there is no harm in romanticising. After all, the field invites it. Its history involves folkcraft and sailors, its form is artistic, its practice a shared code surrounded by secrecy and mystification, its tools handmade, its services often traded, its training tough: experimentation does not work – online videos cannot teach which angle to tilt the machine at. The book leaves one with a nostalgia that is perplexing, until one realises that it is the kind of anticipatory grief with which we approach things that are still here but soon to be gone. I hope that in the relentless battle within the capitalist system, good old-school ethic persists – with all its contradictions – for as long as it can.