Sezin Koehler had the perfect tattoo in mind. She imagined blue and purple swirls rising up her arm to match the colorful tattoos adorning her shoulders. After hours of planning and research, she brought her idea to a tattoo artist.
The artist took one look at her and said no.
“Your skin tone is a problem,” she remembers the artist telling her.
Koehler, 42, went to multiple artists, who said her skin was too dark to be tattooed in color. They suggested black and gray, even though Koehler already had blue and purple tattoos.
Each time, Koehler left the tattoo shops crying.
“Artists should be able to paint on any canvas,” said Koehler, a Sri Lankan and Lithuanian American culture writer from southeast Florida. “And if you can’t, there’s the internet, books, networks of artists that can teach you. If you wanted to learn, you could. So the fact is they’re making a choice that they only want certain kinds of people to tattoo. And that is racist. There’s no excuse for it.”
Racism manifests itself in the tattoo industry in different ways, experts told USA TODAY. Tattoo artists of color point to discriminatory hiring practices, racist or culturally appropriative imagery in tattoo designs, wage disparity, and a lack of respect given to tattoo artists of color.
As the industry faces internal calls to reckon with its own whiteness, many artists point to one major issue: a pervasive opinion that the ideal skin color to tattoo is white. Despite deep histories of tattooing…
