To me a good tattoo is a clean outline, smooth shading,
if it's color, solid color,
and originality.
What makes a good tattoo changes.
If you have lighter skin,
you can almost do a tattoo just as you would a painting.
But if you have darker skin,
then you need to simplify it, so it can be seen.
When it come to tattooing,
I'm just a vessel of that creativity.
I'm just sitting back, watching my hand move.
I'm not thinking about it. I know it ain't me no more.
It's creation, it's God, it's another place.
And I don't care what the complexion of the person is.
I'm gonna make them something beautiful.
Who is Miya Bailey?
I would probably say an artist, community builder,
team builder.
I would describe Peters Street Station first as an art
and design community center, down here in Atlanta.
We got tattoo artists, our painters, our writers, our musicians,
our singers, under one roof,
and we feed off each other.
And my whole goal here is to create new styles of art
and let these younger artists shine, train them,
make sure I got full attention on their resources.
My whole goal is to see them
just go as far as they wanna go.
Right now, I shall lead you into the humble abode.
When people come in
and they're getting a tattoo,
we give them a tour of the building.
Miya has his private art collection hanging up here.
My whole goal is to make sure that people come here
and feel welcomed.
So this is Miya's station.
This is where you will be getting tattooed.
I want them be excited too, 'cause when they excited,
it make me excited.
When the client get here, I'm not gonna be here,
but I got apprentices.
And what they're supposed
to do is get this client comfortable.
Nice to meet you.
All right so what're you getting today?
I don't know.
You don't know? No.
There are a couple of elements I would like to include.
Like, I would like an Om. That's very important to me.
Like, it's a very big part of who
and what I am.
Before I get to work, you know, the first thing I do,
I make sure I got some alone time.
Take a long walk.
I kind of take as much time as I can with my dogs,
enjoy that, watch them play around.
I really truly don't know exactly what I'm gonna do
till I get there.
Good to meet you. You as well.
Can you tell me your concept today?
So, I'm a tattoo artist, Yeah.
right?
And you are my inspiration for being one.
Oh thank you man, damn.
I would love anything, your style.
I like bright colors
and I love cartoons.
If you can like, your favorite cartoon character-
Simpsons. "The Simpsons"?
Yes.
When I meet the person for the first time,
I kind of just let them do their talking,
you know what I'm saying?
Like, when they explain it to me face to face,
I can feel it.
I like abstract work. I like masks.
I have a lot of people in healthcare in my family,
so I wanted to kind of just give a little tribute
to the healers in my family.
Okay. Okay.
Once they start reading out the story it's like,
"okay, either can be family based
or trauma, or overcoming, or spiritual growth."
When I was telling my wife about coming here
and like how this was,
I don't wanna say it's a religious experience for me
but it is. Yeah.
You know what I mean?
And so I just want that pouring into this.
Before we can start step one,
my apprentices, they prep the whole area.
They set up my inks in certain orders,
through darks to lights.
Then they gonna shave the arm
and just make sure that the skin is completely smooth
without hair.
You don't want a needle jagging up in a piece of hair.
Or you run over a piece of hair
and you mess up your line, or getting tangled
and it pulls the hair out,
that hurts, you know what I'm saying?
The next step is to freehand work.
I get my red marker first. Red is just sketch.
So you'll see me sketch with the red,
get a nice rhythm going,
then I take a black marker,
and then I do the black line,
that's the actual line that the client's gonna see.
That's when I'm showing the actual designs,
my guidelines, the black lines.
When I use straight lines, that means I'm thinking logic,
thinking thoughts, but anytime you see curves
and movement in it, it represents love or emotion.
After I finish doing the black ink,
then that's when, you know,
I'm kind of finished the design.
Let the clients stand up, look in the mirror.
Usually they like it. I just wait for that expression.
And once I get that expression on their face,
then I know that it's gonna be a good session.
Increasingly the institutional art world is honing in
on tattooing as being a kind of art.
And we've seen people
that have completed their art degrees,
moving to tattooing.
I'm David Lane.
I'm an assistant professor of Criminal Justice Sciences
at Illinois State University.
Part of what I study is crime
and deviance,
and the other part is culture
and art.
The crime
and deviance pays the bills,
but I get to do the art part when I study tattooing.
The oldest human bodies ever recovered have tattoos on them,
meaning that we know it's
at least a 5,000 year old practice.
There's not a single tribal society in the world,
in which the indigenous people don't practice tattooing.
We can go to New Zealand, historically,
and the Mallory tribes.
Often their face documented a lot of things like
whether people were on their first or second marriage,
what kind of labor they carried out, their family lineage,
all sorts of things could be read off the face.
Here in what's now the United States,
we have documentation that Alaskan natives tattooed.
People in the Southwest tattoo themselves,
even in Tennessee, we found 2000 year old tattoo needles.
And then ultimately,
if we think about our contemporary context,
tattooing, it's more popular
and accessible than it ever has been before.
There were a few sort of, pop culture things
that all sort of, coincided over a number of decades.
You had pop stars getting tattooed
and by the 1980s,
and definitely by the '90s,
you're starting to see athletes,
whether it's football or NBA, they're visibly tattooed.
By the time we get into the mid-2000's,
we sort of have the birth of social media
and that allows people to take images
of their own tattoos,
or take images of tattoos they produced
and spread it to new audiences easier.
When I first started doing this research,
and this is over a decade ago,
Jacci Gresham was one of the first names that ever came up.
The conversation around Jacci,
it can be summed up in a couple words: original,
and groundbreaking.
My name is Jacci Gresham,
and I've been in New Orleans for 45 years tattooing.
I'm the first Black woman to tattoo.
This shop, back in the '70s
and '80s, we had bike clubs come in here every Sunday.
They would come in here.
And back then, that was pretty much your clientele.
Jackie was doing imagery
that was an aesthetic challenge to
what some white tattooers had considered the sort of,
essence of tattooing.
So she sort of broke in ground in that sense.
Today, tattoos, the different types are endless.
If you can see it, we can do it as a tattoo.
Ms. Jacci, the world should know who she is,
in my opinion.
She's special. Imagine what she had to deal with.
I came up in the '90s,
and it was super racist.
So I couldn't imagine the things she had to go through.
I think it makes it harder that I was a Black person.
I think also women in the industry have a hard time as well.
When I wanted to buy this building,
I had $15,000 down,
and that's 25%, but the people would not sell it to me.
So that is a prime example.
But with our society today,
I don't think you're gonna have a problem.
They have a lot of super Black artists
that are incredible tattoo artists,
and I think that people will come to you
and appreciate the good artwork that you're doing.
Once this tattoo is laid out
and I'm doing free hand,
I start everything from the right-hand corner,
so I don't swipe off my stencil.
So you'll see me go
and do a quick outline around the whole entire thing,
because if I don't,
it's gonna be wiping off, the person's gonna be sweatin'
and all this stuff.
So I'm doing a quick outline
around the whole entire thing so I don't lose it.
Then I come in with different line weights,
doubling up lines to make it fatter, thicker,
and then I fill up my solid black areas next
to build out contrast.
When I'm doing color,
I always say, "What's the darkest point on my tattoo?"
So I might do, say,
"Hey, I'm gonna use turquoise
and I'm gonna do another color next to turquoise
that's not related to turquoise",
so it's gonna make the darker turquoise color
look even brighter.
With the black
and grays, there's more thinking with black
and gray a little bit, because with black
and gray, you really gotta make an image pop out using
only a few tones.
With a color tattoo, the black
and gray under the tattoo is just your contrast.
Then you're throwing color
right on top of that, like a overlay.
So, those pores are open
and they're healing at the same time,
so you gotta hurry up doing this color,
it's getting swollen
and sore right now.
I gotta knock this out before this person tap out on me.
I was probably always an artist growing up.
My mom was like, I wasn't even walking,
and I could draw.
And then as a child, I was going to the library
and one of the books I picked up was created
by Don Ed Hardy.
And I read it, I thought about my father having a tattoo.
So, my mind clicked.
I was like "man, you know,
I think something I'm interested in doing."
And you know,
and in my time wasn't Black tattoo artists at all.
It was probably like, at this time,
probably four in the world,
and there was no Black tattoo artists
in North Carolina period, I was the first one.
So, I ended up going to a tattoo shop called Liquid Dragon,
Took me in man
and just showed me some ropes,
but I was messing around in the streets
and kind of blew that.
Just trying to find myself as a young man,
getting in a whole bunch of trouble, like most young men do,
and I blew my opportunity,
but it kind of opened up a door for me
to move out of my hometown
and move to Atlanta.
And I ended up opening up my first tattoo shop.
It made some good money,
so it gave me that freedom to be able to paint
and explore art more in the gallery scene.
I'm a painter. That's what I really do for a living.
Painting, I feel like that's Miya right there.
You get to see pure me. I'm not worried about nothing.
I'm not worried about if it's pretty or not,
because tattooing, I gotta make it pretty.
I gotta make it beautiful.
But painting, you don't have to make it beautiful.
You feeling ugly, then you can express that.
We are done.
Once you finished the color, or the black
and gray, whatever tattoo you're doing,
the next step is really, they gone see it.
They look at it from that angle,
but then they wanna look in the mirror
so they can see up in the reflection
of how it will be naturally on their arm.
The second reaction is very important.
You know what I'm saying?
'Cause you definitely, it's over,
you want them to feel relief
and you want them to be happy at the same time.
You like it?
I love it.
Gimme a hug.
Thank you so much, Thank you.
it was an honor.
That's the part I like the most,
when that client look in that mirror
and see that permanent thing I put on them.
Yeah, man, it's a big responsibility.
Then we bring them back.
I take my photos, my pictures for my social media,
and then I wrap 'em up.
I use like a saran wrap, basic stuff,
just to catch the blood
and it don't mess up their clothes.
Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
When it's done, I'm more thankful than anything,
'cause I'm like, "Damn, I just made $1,500
and this money is gonna go back to this apprentice
that's hosting them.
It's going back to their careers,
giving them a place to work."
And it's just a good cycle, that's what I'm trying to do.
If you want there to be a vibrant tattoo culture,
you ought to go be a member of it.
So, go meet tattooers
and get to know them
and figure out if you like them,
'cause you're gonna have a moment
that's gonna be with you for awhile.
You might as well have a good time while doing it.
When it comes to tattooing,
I be feeling more like a healer or Shaman.
Even though you really don't need a tattoo,
but it made me feel like they needed that,
and it's a relief for them, it's a relief for me.