Take a quick walk around, and you’ll notice that tattoos are just about everywhere you look, which is kind of a nutty concept. Considering that it wasn’t really that long ago that finding a tattoo parlor was not really easy, nowadays, you can find parlors quite readily and with clientele out the wazoo. Teachers, lawyers, and law enforcement officers are just some of the individuals you would never have thought would be caught with any kind of body art, yet they are part of the ever-growing population of tattoo devotees in this country & around the world. Tattooing has certainly come a long wa y seoul tattoo.
Well, it’s better said that tattoo parlors have come a long way. It used to be that finding tattoos on people was something that was thought of as truly the mark of an outsider. Only salty sailors, criminals, and other unsavory characters had these marks on their skin. The act of tattooing was being done “on the down-low”, with no mechanical assistance at all. Individual prick & poking with substances serving as ink mirrored the traditional styles used by native peoples, but it was a grueling process.
Any practicing tattoo artist will tell you that the one thing that proves to be instrumental in their development as an artist is being able to apprentice under someone AND to be able to actually work on their craft. Things weren’t that way for a long time, and society was not OK with this practice. Even with the most rudimentary tattooing process, practice would have been ideal, but any such activity had to be kept away from the prying eyes of “decent people”.
Probably the biggest change to have come to tattooing was the development of the tattoo machine. Having a mechanized tool that could take the entire tattooing process and make it faster, as well as more precise & accurate, revolutionized tattooing. As the 19th century came to a close, the United States saw the first tattoo parlors in the country open up. The 20th century would only become bigger for the practice, but it’s important to note that society still had an issue with how it looked at body art, no matter who got inked up.