People Are Getting COVID-19 Tattoos and Here Are 30 of The Most Creative Ones
Inking your skin is just one last step in the journey of giving yourself a tattoo. In reality, it all starts from hours spent browsing tattoo ideas and annoying your friends with an endless stream of “what do you think?” images.
And our love for ink has never been so big. A recent study has shown that 30% of Americans have at least one tattoo, which is five times more than eight years ago.
But many people have found a source of inspiration in the recent pandemic. In fact, coronavirus-themed tattoos are becoming a quirky sub-genre which represents everything we’ve been living with in the past months.
h/t: boredpanda
It’s no secret that the booming tattoo industry has been severely affected by the coronavirus pandemic since it’s based on constant physical contact. Moreover, the industry doesn’t really have a well-organized inside structure that would know how to deal with this sort of crisis.
Maxime Plescia-Büchi, founder of Sang Bleu Tattoo studios, believes that “unlike any other industry, it doesn’t have any structure where a talented individual would be ‘taken care of’ or managed by another entity focused more specifically on finances, marketing, etc.”
Quite simply, if you have eyes, hands, talent, and ink, you can be a tattoo artist. As a result, some artists and tattoo parlors find themselves lacking a clear back-up plan.
Some tattoo artists are fearful about how the industry will look after the pandemic. Zac Scheinbaum, a San Francisco–based artist, told GQ: “There’s a lot of fear about what going back to work will look like. What’s it going to take for [tattooers] to feel safe to be able to go back to work and make a living?”
On the other hand, people are really hungry to get tattooed in this moment of crisis. Some want to make a tribute; others, on the contrary, to get away from the problems and immerse themselves in the creative world of skin art.
“There’s a weird magic to tattoos that bring people happiness. It’s unexplainable,” Nathan Kostechko, the cofounder of the art collective Heavens, told GQ.
