Are Tattoos Still Cool?
TATTOOS IN AUSTIN are arguably as identifiable to tourists and newcomers as Matt’s El Rancho, as ubiquitous as Lime scooters and Longhorn attire.
If, when tooling around the city on one of those scooters, you happen to lose control and crash headlong into a Tesla, odds are the doctor at the emergency room who treats your injuries will have some wicked tats. And I’m not just talking about a little butterfly on someone’s ankle: full sleeves and tapestries across backs and thighs are prominent here.
While precise figures are hard to come by, Austin was previously ranked 6th most tattoo-friendly city in the US (albeit back in 2012, and deemed so by a site called Total Beauty, which I assume is not staffed by demographic statisticians). A Google search shows over 150 tattoo shops in the Austin metro area, and while this magazine doesn’t have the budget to verify that, I think it’s safe to say that there’s plenty of demand. If you live here, you get it. Almost everyone you see, whether it’s a crust punk, a crypto bro, or a corporate executive, will have a light dusting of green somewhere on their body: it’s as inevitable as the effects of time on an old penny.
In a city that has historically embraced the arts, environmental activism, hippie ethos, and entrepreneurial individualism, it’s no wonder that tattoos would be part of the aesthetic. Austin’s famously laid-back, countercultural spirit no doubt attracted and incubated people who wanted to showcase their personality with body art. And according to at least one small study, despite the popularity of tattoos today, they’re still perceived as somewhat deviant, which on the surface puts them in the category of weird (and therefore, by Austin’s metric, cool). If you’re an Austin greenhorn without any identifiably weird personality traits, the sea of tattoos here is going to stand out to you.
So what is Alex, a Dockers-wearing, milquetoast CPA from Virginia, supposed to do to fit in? Well, after a night of drinking with his new Oracle sales bro coworkers, he might be coaxed into a tattoo shop, pick up a flash of bleeding warthog for closer inspection, and before he can change his mind, have it permanently recreated on his thigh. This will live on beyond his subsequent forays into mustachioism and mulletdom. At first an easy conversation starter, that tattoo will in later years become his badge of honor, forever emblematic of his life in Austin.
An Austin rite of passage.
Truly, you can get quite weird and transformative in Austin without any major consequences, especially as a young adult. This city enables and encourages a kind of personality spelunking with an ease that many other cities can’t. Getting tattoos, growing your hair long, donning a mustache, wearing dirty old glasses from the 80s, dressing like your dad did in high school, and maintaining your same level of job security won’t be possible in Raleigh, North Carolina, but one can accomplish this in Austin. Or, you can grow dreadlocks and start wearing crystals around your neck. It speaks to the inherent weirdness of Austin that someone dressed as a shaman will generally blend in just as easily as someone dressed in golf or pickleball casual.
But herein lies a question that threatens the Keep Austin Weird mantra: are tattoos actually still a viable metric of weird, a cool dismissal of what’s mainstream? Or are they a canary in the proverbial coal mine, signaling yet another form of gentrification? If “Keep Austin Weird” itself became trademarked and commodified, how does that sit with the countercultural roots of Austin? Does that portend an ill omen for anything else we hold near and weird to our hearts?
Weirdness is certainly not the face of Austin, but it’s not hidden in a hipster corner either. David Komie, the dreadlocked “Attorney That Rocks,” is not some word-of-mouth phenomenon. He follows you around town, his face plastered on buses and billboards. Throngs of visitors in boat tours watch the bats fly out from the Congress Avenue bridge for more than half the year. The Cathedral of Junk will be found on most “Things To Do in Austin” lists. This isn’t to say there aren’t more niche, more weird things here, but rather that so-called weirdness is not hard to find. As much as people might bemoan the influx of Fortune 500 companies, boogeyman Californians, and rampant residential and commercial development that threaten the cherished quirkiness of Austin, it can’t be denied that some of those quirks (and perhaps even the very concept of weirdness) have become mainstream.
Tattoos, perhaps more than anything else in Austin, signal the broad appeal and accessibility of so-called weirdness as a personality trait. Of course, you still have your metalhead man-children, lesbian gym rats, and spiritual gurus of every astrological sign—people who have routinely used tattoos to express themselves. But there are also people out here collecting tattoos like fridge magnets, with no definable or coherent aesthetic. And there’s nothing at risk for them doing so. In Austin, no one is going to look down on those people, question them, ridicule them. They’re not going out on a limb to make a statement with permanent art on their body. They’re just doing what’s already accepted.
If we accept the premise that tattoos still contribute to the weird fabric of the city, then it seems the more people we have walking around this city with tattoos, the better. But Austin’s growing population has also been equated to a life-threatening environmental hazard for weirdness. So how do we reconcile that? At what point does weird need a new definition, if it’s associated with something so widespread?
Could weirdness be something that shifts subtly over time, like the evolution of Republicans and Democrats? Is someone like me, still naked as I came, now part of some new underground, some bucking of a trend, some resistance that might be a new counterculture? I don’t believe anyone thinks I’m weird for not having tattoos, but contrasted with the abundance of tattoos, it’s not unlike someone who has no social media accounts—the untatted individual raises some interesting questions as to why they live that way, at least in Austin.
Defining the criteria for weird is something we as a community will continue to grapple with in many ways as Austin keeps growing. I don’t know where on the x axis of “Number of People with Tattoos” and the y axis of “Weirdness” we’ll start to see a dip on the weirdness level. And I certainly appreciate the protective instinct that Austinites have over what sets this city apart and their desire to ensure the trend line of weird is at least stable. But perhaps we should look at what is weird and cool a bit differently. Can’t weirdness be abundant? Isn’t it just a mindset, more than anything else?
If people are drawn to Austin, it’s certainly not because of all the things that have the potential to destroy its culture. Call me an optimist or an idealist, but while there’s an undeniable threat from higher property taxes and increased development pushing out small businesses, diverse communities, and unique things we love, I believe the spirit of the weird will always find a way to persist. Surely, no one wants to live here because of commercialism and decaying local institutions. I don’t believe many people have an express purpose to make Austin normal. The weirdness is at least part of what brings people here, and we should celebrate that, especially if a latent weirdness within newcomers is nurtured and allowed to flourish, keeping the overall spirit of weird alive (remember Alex, our CPA from earlier?).
I know the possibilities for this because I’ve seen Austin’s encouragement of weird evinced in myself. I’ve talked with people about psychedelics and plant medicine as casually as I would the weather. I’ve stood in circles holding hands with strangers to do breath work and find my heart center. I’ve performed at an open mic dressed as Richard Simmons. In other words, I believe Austin will always draw in and empower people who, like me, identify with the inherent creative, social, experimental energy that makes this city special and is worth preserving.
Richard Simmons or Harlem Globetrotter? You decide.
Yes, some of the old Austin identity will be lost in the process of our growth, as it already has over the decades. Eventually, maybe tattoos won’t be seen as something special or weird or cool. But will they still be something that defines Austin? I believe so. We’ll have to figure that out together. And much more so than weirdness, I’d argue that reckoning with our identity is perhaps the most quintessential Austin trait of all.
