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.

“Want a glass of wine?” my friend yelled at me down the hall, yanking a cork out of a wine bottle. My writer’s group had rented a lake house in Vermont this past June on an island in the middle of Lake Champlain, where shorebirds and ducklings paddled past.

The thought of relaxing at the firepit in an Adirondack chair with an ice-cold glass of rosé made me salivate, the way my dog does when I pull the lid off the treat jar. Any other time, I would’ve had a glass (or two), but I was trying out sobriety.

For years, I toyed with the idea but couldn’t ever seem to do it until my drinking started to keep me up at night. I tried natural sleep supplements and acupuncture but neither worked.

At 44, I didn’t drink enough to experience major hangovers like I did when I was a journalist in my 20s living in New York City. And though I imbibed nightly during the initial throes of the COVID pandemic, I’d recently cut way back. When I unexpectedly hit perimenopause in my early 40s, my body began reacting to alcohol differently. Even if I had just one glass of wine, I’d wake up multiple times during the night. I suppose I could have avoided those moonlight bathroom trips with a sleeping pill, but that would have only masked the bigger problem: I wanted to quit drinking and couldn’t.

I wrote about my frustration in my journal. Was a Thursday night Grey Goose martini worth the three cappuccinos I’d need to shake off brain fog on Friday morning?

I was not alone in my sudden questioning of a lifelong habit. Elaine Skoulas, a licensed marriage and family therapist based in L.A. who specializes in addiction, said it’s not uncommon to reevaluate your drinking habits as you age.

“Often I hear how much people’s relationship to alcohol changes at different stages in life,” said Skoulas, who has been sober for 12 years. Whether it’s due to aging or a change in metabolism, many people slow down their alcohol consumption as they get older because the negative effects of drinking worsen over time, she said.

But what would quitting do to my personal life? Alcohol was entwined with some of my biggest life milestones. I met my husband at a bar over a Northern Standard cocktail and then wrote about it for Food & Wine magazine. I received a bottle of Vermont WhistlePig rye for my 40th birthday and a Merry Edwards Russian River Pinot as a wedding present. And I did unabashedly love to drink — Miraval rosé under the summer stars, mezcal margaritas on lazy Saturday afternoons, boozy Bloody Marys with scrambled eggs and croissants on Sunday mornings.

If alcohol hadn’t started affecting my sleep, I probably would have never given it up. I didn’t even stop when my husband and I started fertility treatment in 2020. Ordering a cozy whiskey cocktail at my favorite local bar dulled the disappointment of every IVF failure.

I don’t think anyone would have called me an alcoholic, but I knew I had a problem when I realized how often I was writing in my journal about how crappy wine made me feel.

Then last December, an astrologer told me that my chart suggested I could benefit immensely from giving something up. It made me think about how I was only 7 years old when I stopped eating meat. I’d managed to stick with it my entire life.

Could I give up alcohol too? Christmas was just around the corner. I worried that my friendships would suffer. And what would my husband and I do for fun if we couldn’t go to our favorite bar on the weekend?

I finally reached my breaking point in March when I met two friends out for dinner. We all ordered drinks, then spent most of the meal discussing our not-so-great relationship with alcohol. I slept terribly that night and decided the next morning to try and stop for good.

I was tired of feeling guilty for giving my body something that made it miserable, tired of strategizing and rationalizing my alcohol consumption and tired of trying to get my brain to focus with so little sleep.

My husband was supportive, and so were my friends. I was lucky. Skoulas says having a reliable circle of loved ones can make all the difference in staying sober.

“It creates a sense of accountability because if you’re trying to get through an event on your own and nobody knows, of course it’s easier to reach for alcohol than if you have a friend standing next to you who knows that you weren’t planning to drink for the night,” she said.

I couldn’t have picked a worse time to try out sobriety. One week in, I attended a funeral for a woman in my writer’s group, then went out for dinner later that night, where I kept replaying the events of the day. I was grieving her absence, and I urgently needed a drink to take away some of the sadness. I leaned toward my husband.

“Maybe we could split a drink?” I asked.

“Do you really want one?” he replied.

I did. Anything to take away my emotional pain. But then I thought about the next morning. My sadness would still be there, and even harder to process on poor sleep. By the time we saw our waiter again we had finished our meal, and my wave of wanting had passed.

The following weeks were really hard. I was still waking up in the middle of the night, and it felt like I was competing against my own desires. I drank seltzer at weddings and took my 83-year-old father to stressful doctors’ appointments without later unwinding with a martini. When my friend’s fiancée took his own life, I was surrounded by wine bottles strewn across the kitchen counter, but each time I walked out the door stone-cold sober, I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Steve Kobashigawa, a marriage and family therapist based in L.A., said that when you feel a craving come on, do what you need to do to get into a more positive headspace. Call someone, journal or use a mindful drinking app like Sunnyside. Sometimes avoiding alcohol can seem impossible, but staying sober gets “exponentially easier” over time, he said.

“It’s kind of like a jet airliner: It takes a lot of energy to get it up into the sky, but once you get there, it’s much easier to manage,” said Kobashigawa, who specializes in addiction treatment and has been sober for 25 years.

Skoulas advised staying away from places where you used to drink regularly while you set new, healthful patterns and rewire your brain. If you go back to where you used to drink, even if you don’t have alcohol, your brain still experiences some of the more euphoric parts of drinking, which can be triggering.

“When you walk into familiar places, some of those neurotransmitters start to get released,” she said.

I learned that if I’m going to be around drinkers, it’s best to plan ahead. When I went away with my friends to the lake house, I called my local cocktail bar ahead of time and asked if they could make me a nonalcoholic beverage to-go. I felt silly doing it, but they told me that my order wasn’t all that unusual.

I had a great time that weekend, even though I was the only sober one in the group. Sometimes when people ask why I’m not drinking, it’s easier to say that I’m suffering from insomnia than it is to talk about my complicated relationship with alcohol.

Recently, a friend asked why I wasn’t drinking.

“I’m just taking a break,” I said. She responded with a sly smile — she knew I’d tried IVF before.

“I’m not pregnant,” I said, surprised that I could talk about my infertility without getting upset. That’s when I realized how much alcohol — a depressant — had been affecting my mood. A cocktail could only mask the pain for so long. I eventually had to face reality.

Alcohol provides a surge of dopamine and when that’s taken away, you initially might feel sad, but that usually fades within a few months, Kobashigawa said. Sometimes giving up drinking involves anhedonia, which is an inability to find pleasure in the activities you once enjoyed. But you can help avoid that feeling by keeping active.

“If you’re feeling flat, it’s unfortunately part of the recovery process, but try to take a walk or re-engage in the activities that used to be pleasurable for you,” he said.

In a few months, I’m going to Italy on my honeymoon. I had thought I’d want to spend evenings there imbibing with a Super Tuscan wine, but now I’m not so sure. These days, I feel more like myself. I’ve lost weight and have fewer wrinkles. Sobriety, it turns out, is way cheaper than Botox. It’s hard to imagine going back to how things used to be.

I had always thought that if I gave up my weekend martinis, I’d be imprisoned by the desire to drink, but here I am — sober for almost five months. Aside from the occasional craving, I don’t really think about alcohol. I drink raspberry shrub cocktails when I vacation with my girlfriends and go out for ice cream with my husband on the weekends. I’m less anxious and more present in conversations and in the world around me. In sobriety, I actually feel freer than ever.

Betsy Vereckey’s’ debut memoir is forthcoming next summer from Rootstock Publishing. She lives in Vermont with her husband and four boisterous terriers.