Lifestyle
'It's totally different': Younger tattoo artists are ditching the machine
Abby Ingwersen, a guest artist at Nice Try Tattoo, works on a client using the stick and poke method.
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For purveyors of an artform that’s famously permanent, tattoo artists sure like to switch things up.
In studios and shops around the world, younger artists are challenging the traditional ways of running a business and poking ink into skin.
From independent collectives to a revival of the so-called “stick and poke” tattoo, a new generation is leaving its mark.
A new studio structure
In a typical walk-in tattoo shop, there is an owner, some contracted artists and maybe an apprentice. The artists pay a percentage of their earnings to the owner in return for expertise, a place to work and a storefront to attract clients.
But some artists are forging ahead with a new, non-hierarchical vision: the independent studio, where the idea is to cut out the middle-man.
That’s where you will find Ella Sklaw, one of the five artists who works out of Nice Try Tattoo — a collaboratively-owned and operated tattoo studio they started three years ago with a friend in Brooklyn, New York.
The members of Nice Try Tattoo, which includes (clockwise from top left) Cierson Zambo, Sydney Kleinrock, Ella Sklaw, Sara Sremac and Lu Walstad.
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Ella Sklaw talks through the process with their client, Maddie Dennis-Yates.
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From the outside, Nice Try Tattoo is an unassuming warehouse. But once you enter, you’re met with comfy couches, walls plastered with thank you notes, and a wooden dining table in the back.
“We visually decorate the entire shop together,” Sklaw says. “We try to keep it super warm and super inviting. I think we really go for this idea that you should have stuff to look at while you’re getting a tattoo, because it hurts.”
For Maddie Dennis-Yates, one of Sklaw’s clients on a recent summer day, those touches are appreciated.
“There’s been a real shift in the vibe of tattoo studios lately,” Dennis-Yates says. “Even just having it in a building like this, it’s got this certain coziness to it. Like, you have to go find it somewhere, you can’t just stumble in off the street.”
For an array of reasons, the pandemic contributed to the rise of independent studios — some artists took up the skill during lockdown, while some clients found extra money or the confidence to get inked. And while there isn’t complete data on the number of independent studios versus traditional shops, the industry as a whole grew a steady 2.5% a year from 2018-23, according to research from IBISWorld.
The move towards independent work models is a symptom of something larger, especially for artists and creatives who have been the most historically exploited, according to Trebor Scholz, a New School professor who researches cooperative entrepreneurship.
“We have seen the increase during the pandemic, but this is something that is part of a much longer shift in the way work has performed over the past 50 years really, and these kind of non-standard work arrangements,” he said. “I don’t think the clock will be turned back on them.”
A “stick and poke” revival
Along with a shift in the business model there are also evolving styles and tastes — both from customers and artists.
Some artists at Nice Try Tattoo have left the machine behind and rely on a singular needle to etch their designs. It’s a method often called “stick and poke” or “hand poke.”
Nicole Monde works out of a private studio in Brooklyn.
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“I just take the needle and I just put it in my hand and then I just poke the design dot by dot,” says Nicole Monde, a hand poke artist who shares a private studio space in Brooklyn. “It’s very similar to machine in that it’s going the same depth, I’m using the same ink, same supplies, same needles and everything, but I’m just taking the machine out of it.”
Hand poke tattoos can conjure up images of college dorm rooms or DIY mishaps, and Monde acknowledges it’s not always seen as legitimate.
Monde puts together a tattoo design.
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“I think a lot of people don’t see it as a valid form of tattooing because the industry standard for so long has been using a machine. But I like to point out the fact that before electricity existed, this is how all tattoos were being done,” she says.
Some clients, like E Barnick, prefer hand poke tattoos for the overall experience.
“It’s totally different,” Barnick says. “I mean, it doesn’t hurt nearly as much and it’s also just a lot more intimate to have somebody hand poking.”
Still, some artists make the case that there are benefits to the traditional shop model that are lost when artists work out of independent studios and trade in different approaches.
“They’re missing out on the grander scale of experience and I think it’s harder to advance as an artist. I think you need that interaction with the average daily wacko wandering in off the street,” says Mehai Bakaty, who owned Fineline Tattoo in Manhattan until it was forced to close due to rising costs and the pandemic lockdowns.
Still, Bakaty now works from an independent studio as well, and says it takes him back to the 1990s when New York tattoo shops used to all operate under the radar because their operations were illegal and there were concerns about AIDS transmission.
“Sort of underground, clandestine, appointment-only, word of mouth, no advertising, no storefronts,” he says.
It’s not lost on Sklaw, from Nice Try Tattoo, that their collective studio model has come full circle back to these same ideas: word of mouth. No storefronts. No walk-ins.
Sklaw works on a client.
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Artist Sara Sremac show her client E Barnick their new tattoo.
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“We kind of exist in the legacy of that alternative space,” Sklaw says.
These days, whether clients choose a machine or hand-poked tattoo, at an indie studio or a shop, the goal is the same: distinctive, meaningful, permanent art.
“Tattoos, I mean, cross-culturally, were always something to be extremely proud of,” says Lars Krutak, a tattoo anthropologist. “Because we’re talking primarily these … identify you as a member of a community.”
So when clients leave Nice Try Tattoo or a traditional shop, they aren’t just coming home with a new tattoo. The marking is a symbol of a community much larger than a singular artist or a singular needle.
Sunday Puzzle
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On-air challenge
Today’s theme is “hot.” Every answer is a familiar two-word phrase in which the first word starts HO- and the second word starts with T-.
Ex. Rowdy bar with country music, in slang –> HONKY TONK
1. Guided walkthrough of a property
2. Any member of the N.H.L.
3. Lone Star State metropolis that’s the fourth-largest city in the U.S.
4. Like an animal with its four legs bound (hyph.)
5. Instruction manual (hyph.)
6. A little pompous and arrogant, informally (hyph.)
7. Punny greeting from a magician
8. Someone who steals animals from a stable
9. Congestion that drivers encounter around July 4th, say
10. Acquisition of a company against its will.
11. Exclamation for “wow!” on TV’s “Batman”
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge comes from Evan Kalish, of Bayside, N.Y. Take the name of a nocturnal creature, in two words. The first word is a spooky sound. Move the last letter of the first word to the start of the second word and you’ll get another spooky, nocturnal sound. What is the creature and what are the sounds?
Answer: Screech owl –> howl
Winner
Dan Sadoff of St. Paul, Minnesota
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 2 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
If you’re struggling to use up leftovers like a half-eaten rotisserie chicken, turn the assignment into a creative exercise, says chef Margaret Li. It’ll make the cooking process more fun and less guilt-driven.
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On a recent weeknight, I opened up my fridge and found an assortment of half-eaten or ignored food.
That included takeout that I didn’t find appetizing enough to eat for lunch. A rotisserie chicken with most of the meat picked off. A couple of raw vegetables from the farmers market that were starting to wilt.
“There’s nothing to eat,” I told myself. Yet even I knew that was ridiculous. There was plenty of food in my fridge. I just didn’t feel inspired to cook with it.
So I asked some chefs for guidance. How could I more consistently use leftovers and the other ingredients I tend to overlook?
Start with a mindset shift, says Margaret Li, chef and co-author of the cookbook Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Think about cooking with leftovers as a creative, experimental exercise, not a guilt-driven one.
“It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle, and then you get to eat it,” she says.
There are other good reasons to use up your food scraps. Nationally, about a quarter of food products go to waste, according to the nonprofit ReFED. In my own household, where we spend about $200 a week on groceries, that means I might be throwing out the equivalent of $50 of food — an unnecessary burden on my wallet, not to mention the environment.
The chefs I spoke to had some practical tips about using up more of the food we buy. Here are a few that I put to the test.
Find your “hero recipes”
Build up an arsenal of go-to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about any ingredient. Li calls them “hero recipes.”
I tried one of these from her cookbook, called “Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry.” (Scroll down for the recipe.) It includes loose ingredients like “1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables” or “4 cups leafy greens.”
In the spirit of the recipe, I pulled vegetables out of my fridge at random and did not measure them out. The sauce was a simple mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and water. By the time I topped my bowl with chopped scallions, the dish looked like a gourmet meal, not an afterthought.
Other ideas: “You could put anything in a frittata, and it’ll be great,” says Tamar Adler, chef and author of The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z.
Or, if you have day-old rice on hand, cook it alongside other ingredients to make fried rice. “Saute some aromatics — ginger, garlic, onion — in oil,” Adler says. Then add your rice and whatever leftover bits you have, like the rotisserie chicken and older produce I had in my fridge.
“Just take the approach of making it more flavorful and crispy and then spicy, and then usually adding a squeeze of lemon,” Adler says.
Label your leftovers
Keep a permanent marker and painter’s tape in your kitchen to label and date your leftovers, Li says. “That is a classic chef’s method for knowing what something is and when it was made. That saves you the guessing game.”
Adler takes the concept a step further and labels her leftovers with their intended use. Leftover blueberries are labeled “muffins-to-be on Tuesday,” she says. “I really like doing that — assigning the destiny of the food.”
So after a night of Ethiopian takeout, when we ended up with an entire container of leftover injera, I followed Adler’s advice and thought about what it might become in the future.
I imagined scrambling the spongy, tangy bread with eggs, akin to scrambling matzo into matzo brei. “Injera for eggs,” I wrote on the container. Sure enough, their destiny was fulfilled the following morning.
Li keeps a dedicated bag in her freezer just for scraps from which to make chicken or vegetable stock. That bag houses carrot peels, the ends of onions, extra garlic cloves and chicken bones.
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Don’t forget your odds and ends
Adler encouraged me to never, ever throw away the stems of herbs. Stems don’t get as much glory as tender, pretty leaves, but they still have the same herby taste.
“I’m going to chop these herbs up or stick them in a blender with a clove of garlic,” she says. Then add olive oil. “And then it’s just gonna be my base sauce for everything.”
So I foraged a few varieties of half-cut herbs from my refrigerator drawers, most of them sad looking and unidentifiable.
I threw out the stems that had turned brown and gooey and put the rest in a blender. I added garlic on Adler’s instructions, nuts and kale for bulk, and plenty of olive oil and salt. Then, on a whim, I added a splash of olive juice for brightness.
The result was somewhere between a pesto and a chimichurri, and it elevated that night’s otherwise routine dinner. And Adler was right: Once the stems were blended, it tasted exactly the same as the leaves. (The same idea applies for broccoli stems in a cheesy broccoli soup, Li says.)
Li likes to keep her odds and ends organized with an “Eat Me First” box in her fridge. That’s where she keeps half-used lemons, leftover coconut milk or produce that’s starting to get wrinkly. “You kind of have an idea for, OK, here’s where you look first,” she says.
Don’t strive for perfection
Cooking these meals did feel like a game, as Li had suggested. It brought me unexpected joy to use up as many existing ingredients as possible — to the point where I often spent much longer in the kitchen because I kept thinking of new ideas: If I turn these wrinkly sweet potatoes into a soup, then I can caramelize this half-cut onion for a topping, and then I can use the leftover soup as a sauce tomorrow …
Did I cook more often, though? Probably not. My cooking energy burned brighter but fizzled out after a few nights, at which point I ordered takeout.
So I was glad to hear Li’s take: If you’re too hard on yourself, you’re not going to enjoy it at all. “ I try not to be too obsessive about eating absolutely everything,” she says. If my takeout was truly terrible, I’m allowed to toss it or, better yet, compost it.
If you really want to use up everything, you can always chuck ingredients into the freezer. Li has dedicated freezer bags for different dishes, like vegetable scraps for soups or fruit discards for smoothies. (She labels them, of course.)
And how does that smoothie taste? It’s “delicious,” she says, “even if it’s made up of all the things that have been rejected in the past,” she says.
Recipe: Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry
Excerpted from Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Copyright ©2023 by Irene Li and Margaret Li. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sauce
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon water
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon black vinegar, rice vinegar, lime juice, or other acid
- 1 tablespoon neutral oil, or enough to lightly coat the bottom of your wok or skillet
- 1 garlic clove, thinly sliced or minced, or more as desired
- ½-inch piece fresh ginger, minced or grated (optional)
- Pinch chili flakes or 1 small chile pepper, diced (optional)
- 4 cups leafy greens, torn into bite-size pieces, or 1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables, cut into chunks
- Kosher salt
Stir the sauce ingredients together in a small bowl and set by the stove.
Heat a wok or large skillet over high heat until just smoking, then add the neutral oil and tilt to coat the bottom of the pan.
Add the garlic, ginger (if using), and chili flakes (if using) and stir-fry for 10 seconds. Add the greens and/or vegetables, in stages as necessary, and toss in the garlicky oil, then add the sauce and cook to your liking, stirring frequently.
Vegetable chunks may need 4 to 7 minutes — if you want to speed up the process, cover the pot so the vegetables steam for a minute or two, then uncover and toss again. Sturdy greens may need 3 to 5 minutes to get tender (we like to let them sit for a bit and char for extra texture).
Lighter leaves will need less than a minute to wilt down. Stir in a spoonful of any additional sauce you like, season with salt to taste, then sprinkle with your favorite garnishes and a generous drizzle of sesame oil.
A sprinkle of crunch is a great way to finish a stir-fry. Our favorites include crushed cashews or peanuts, toasted sesame seeds, thinly sliced scallions, and fried onions or shallots.
Your turn: What are your favorite go-to leftover recipes?
We’d love to hear from you! Share your recipe with us at lifekit@npr.org with your full name. We may publish it on NPR.org.
The story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks perform onstage during day two of the Boston Calling Music Festival at Boston City Hall Plaza on September 26, 2015 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Mike Lawrie/Getty Images)
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This week’s show was recorded in Chicago with host Peter Sagal, judge and scorekeeper Alzo Slade, Not My Job guest Stephen Malkmus and panelists Emmy Blotnick, Joyelle Nicole Johnson, and Gianmarco Soresi. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.
Who’s Alzo This Time
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Panel Questions
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Our panelists tell three stories about game shows in the news, only one of which is true.
Not My Job: Stephen Malmus, lead singer and guitarist for Pavement, answers our questions about road construction
Indie rock legend and founder of Pavement, Stephen Malkmus, joins us to play a game called, “Pavement repairs are underway!” Three questions about road construction.
Panel Questions
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Limericks
Alzo Slade reads three news-related limericks: Good News For Gym Slobs; Cruisin’ For A Tattooin’; Fringe Food Benefits
Lightning Fill In The Blank
All the news we couldn’t fit anywhere else
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