Tatt For Tatt

In the midst of a freezing Northern winter Megan Massacre answers the call with a slight sniffle from the basement of Worcester Street Social Club, the New York City tattoo parlour where she works. She's packing gear for a weekend trip to Philadelphia for a tattoo convention.

“I travel a lot and lot of it is for work. Conventions bring me places that I might have never had a chance to go to before, so I go. I get to see new places, and I usually try to hang out for a couple of extra days outside of the convention so I can actually see what it looks like outside of the convention centre and see what makes each city or different countries unique – what's cool about it.”

Now established enough through her work as a tattooist, model, TV personality and DJ to be on the convention circuit, the rise in popularity of tattoos over the past decade seems to have perfectly mirrored Massacre's trajectory.

“This month is actually my ten-year tattoo anniversary,” she says excitedly. “It's been exactly ten years for me in the industry, and to see how different everything is from the beginning when I started to now – it's just a completely different industry, it's not even the same thing anymore.

When I started there was no TV shows, and nobody thought I was cool for tattooing. I was a teenager, I was 18 years old, and all my friends thought I was a freak, you know, they thought I was crazy. People thought I was crazy for being so young and a girl and being covered in tattoos. But that's what I wanted to do with my life; it wasn't a sexy thing, it wasn't a smart or cool thing, you know? Even when I went out in public, people would stop me, old women would go, 'Oh, you're ruining your life putting all those tattoos all over you! What were you thinking?' People I didn't even know, they just would harass me and I couldn't believe it.”

Since then the TV shows have arrived – a whole bevy of them, from Tattoo Nightmares to the Miami Ink franchise that spawned New York Ink, which provided Massacre the opportunity to add TV personality to a CV that had already seen her at the forefront of the alt. modelling scene.

“Now, ten years later, it's the complete opposite. People stop me and they're like, 'I love your tattoos, oh my God, they're so great!' It's 100 per cent different and that's what happens when something becomes more mainstream. The TV shows definitely started all that, because it brought tattooing to a group of people that would have never before given it a chance, or even had the opportunity to see that world because they were just so far outside of it, so TV brought it to the mainstream culture.

“I can't complain about it, I think it's pretty cool. I know there's a lot of tattooists that don't like it – the more old school tattooists are not as into it because for them, they've been tattooing 30, 40 years and it's always been this way. So for it to start changing so late in the game for them it makes them uncomfortable; they've been treated like outlaws for their whole life, and all of a sudden now it becomes more popular, they're like, 'Screw you man! Where have you been the last 40 years?' So I get it. But as somebody who has just witnessed the change over the last ten years I think it's great. It's making all of us more money, that's for sure,” Massacre laughs.

The, for now, rise and rise of tattoos has also meant new additions and locations to Massacre's calendar of convention appearances – her first trip Down Under will see her appear at Sydney's Australian Tattoo & Body Art Expo and doing a guest spot at Brisbane tattoo shop Garage Ink.

“It's really cool to get to travel and be able to see how different each place is, and also meeting other artists from other countries is really cool. I see some of the same people at every convention and we've become really good friends, you know, but we only get to see each other at conventions – a travelling band of freaks!”