“I started doing stick and pokes on myself because I was unbelievably bored and I missed tattoo shops so badly,” says Kelsey McKinney, a novelist and co-owner of who lives in Washington, D.C. I waited until the shop opened back up in July to make up that appointment-but not everyone was willing to be so patient. I got a small last-minute piece at my local shop just before businesses closed their doors in New York City in March 2020, since I knew that the bigger project I had scheduled later that month with a popular artist might wind up getting cancelled (it was). Still, people will continue to do things that aren’t exactly safe or conventional, no matter their circumstances. “It’s good for business.” Getting Started With DIY Tattoos at Home “I’ve just booked an appointment to cover up a homemade hand poke job,” he says. Men's HealthĪnd while Aresenau acknowledges that people can and do safely tattoo themselves at home, the quality of the art is an entirely different matter (and he does clarify that “good” is subjective). “The primary concern is cross contamination and exposure to bloodborne pathogens.”Ĭlick here to join for more exclusive health, fitness, and style content. “People have always tattooed themselves at home in some form or another,” says Brooklyn-based artist Josh Arseneau, who practices tattooing with a machine. As social media has helped to popularize and demystify tattooing for wider audiences and more people decide that they want to pick up a needle and ink to stave off boredom and express themselves on their bodies, it’s imperative that they have access to the right information to keep their practice as safe as possible. is done with machines, a much more recent innovation. Body modification practices like this have existed in nearly every culture around the world for millennia, but the dominant form of tattooing in the U.S. The practice is simple: the artist uses a needle to poke ink into the skin to create designs. The precautions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic might not wind up inspiring some quarantined artist to write the next King Lear, but might help to further popularize DIY manual tattooing (often called “stick and poke” or “hand poke” tattooing) with a wide new audience. What was the wildest thing you did in the throes of pandemic-induced boredom? My adventures escalated from buzzing my hair and filming workouts with my dog (reasonable) to piercing my ear, busting my face open (twice), then finally giving myself a tattoo (decidedly less reasonable).
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