Tattoos are a big mainstream in today’s society. You see them everywhere from teens to adults to movies and shows. Nowadays there are over 50,000 tattoo artists just in America alone. There are even dedicated tattooing conventions every year with Americans spending over 1.6 billons dollars on tattoos every year.

Early tattooing rooted in America around the 17 to 1800’s when sailors returned home from Polynesia and Asia and brought the tattoo practice back to the west. They often wore tattoos like anchors, swallows and nautical stars that symbolized the sailor’s journey, and by the 1800s tattooing began to gain popularity in port towns like New York and San Francisco. In 1891 Samuel O’Reilly patented the first electric tattoo machine. This invention made tattoo faster and not too soon after tattoo parlors started to open across America.

Although even after this growth tattoos still had very negative views throughout most of the 20th century. In the 1940s and 1950s, tattoos were mainly associated with military, bikers and even criminals, but in the 1960s and 2970s there was a different problem growing. Tattoos were seen as a health concern with the rapid growing rates of hepatitis in New York City leading to tattoos being temporally ban until 1997.

Leading into the 1990s began a big turning point as alternative culture grew more prominent. Tattoos began to become a sense of fashion for musicians, actors, and athletes. Celebrities like Tupac, Angelina Jolie, and Dennis Rodman started displaying their tattoos within the public view. Later on, into the 2000s tattooing even got its own tv shows based around it like (Miami ink) and (LA ink). By the 2010s tattoos had become common in the workplace with study’s showing a study in 2019 that 40% of people 18-34 had at least one tattoo.

Tattoo culture has and definitely will continue to grow more popular as the years go on. Once seen as an identifying factor for criminals and gang members as drifted to teens to even your mom and dad. Tattoos continue to stay express creativity and art and show who you are and what you believe in.