Principle One: Relationships... How Do Your Tattoos Define You?

Relationships might sound like an odd place to begin a series about tattooing. Broad, maybe even a little soft. But it’s what everything else is built on. And in my experience, it’s the area that requires the biggest adjustment for most people. It’s the first thing that needs some undoing, some unkinking. It took a long time for me too, because it’s one of those layers that’s genuinely obscured. Most people think they already know what tattooing is. The idea that you’d need to examine your relationship to it can feel like a strange question.

So let me bring in a reference point that helped crystallise this for me.

Nothing exists on its own

Recently I came across a philosopher called Iain McGilchrist, who I hadn’t heard speak before. He’s written several books, and the one that came up in the interview I was listening to is called The Matter of Things. At its core, McGilchrist argues that reality isn’t made of isolated things. It’s made of relationships. What we tend to do, especially in the modern Western world, is break things into parts, into objects, into categories. We separate everything out so we can measure and control it. That’s the left hemisphere doing what it does. And what gets lost in that process is the context, and more importantly, the relationship itself. Because nothing actually exists on its own. Everything only is what it is in relation to something else.

From his perspective, relationship isn’t just one aspect of reality. It’s the ground of reality itself.

When I heard that I thought: that’s exactly what I’m pointing to in this first principle. That was the first crack in my own perspective about tattooing. Within my own practice, within the studios I’ve worked in, within the broader industry, and in contrast to how I was observing older cultures relating to their tattoos, we separate everything out. Most people treat tattoos as things. Designs, objects, pieces, isolated experiences. But what actually matters first isn’t the tattoo. It’s the relationship around it. Your relationship to yourself at that moment. Your relationship to the person doing it. Your relationship to meaning over time and to where you’re heading.

Without that relational foundation, the tattoo becomes a fragment. You move away from that moment in time and, without something solid connecting you to it, you might eventually move so far from it that it holds no real relevance anymore. With a strong relationship, the tattoo becomes coherent. It continues to mean something as you change.

The Just Tattoo Club (JTC)

In contemporary tattoo culture, each tattoo is often treated as an isolated moment, disconnected from the ones before or after. Style, trend, technique, placement, approval: all of these tend to be focused on the object, the tattoo itself, while the relationship between the person and their tattoo, or between the tattoo and the identity forming as a result of getting it, gets left undernourished or ignored entirely.

I call this pull the Just Tattoo Club (JTC). The contemporary current that brings people into tattooing from the surface level. I’ve met and tattooed a lot of people in this space. They come in curious, inspired, maybe in a bit of a rebellious moment. There’s a story that brings them in. And then they get swept into a high-volume relationship with tattooing that moves fast, because access is easy and it can stimulate parts of self that haven’t been touched before. Before long they’re heavily tattooed, sometimes confused or surprised by where they’ve ended up.

Some people genuinely enjoy that ride. That’s fine. But either way, very few people come in with a healthy level of awareness about what’s going to happen, or reflect on what has happened in a way that continues to inform what they do next. And so that’s why we start here. Relationships ask us to slow down. To revisit, reflect, and relearn how we relate to tattooing at its most foundational level.

Three core relationships

Within the tattoo process there are three relationships worth examining clearly.

The first is your relationship with your own tattoos. What they mean to you, why you got them, how you relate to each one, what each one’s story is, what your sense of self is in relation to them. This is the territory our mapping process works through, which I’ll speak to more in a moment.

The second is your relationship with the tattooist. Whether there’s one person who tattoos you or several, that relationship shapes your experience significantly. What influence does it carry? What does that person bring to the process, and what are they passing on through how they see and approach their work?

The third is the tattooist’s relationship to the tattoos they’re doing. What connection does the person holding the machine have to the work? What are they transmitting through the way they see tattooing? What are you being imprinted with, beyond the ink?

Most people have never considered the second or third of these at all.

Three stages

There’s also a useful way of mapping where someone is in their overall tattoo relationship, and it follows three broad stages.

The first is the unknown. You haven’t been tattooed yet. Tattooing is a territory you haven’t entered. You don’t even know what the physical sensation is like. This maps onto early childhood developmentally: everything is new, nothing is yet known firsthand.

The second is knowing. You’ve crossed the threshold. You’re getting tattooed, exploring, gathering your own experience, finding your bearings. This is the adolescent stage in many ways: mapping the territory for yourself, accumulating experience, sometimes impulsively.

The third is the known. This is the shift into a more mature relationship with the whole thing. You can see the tracks of where you’ve been seeking and wandering. You start to zoom out. You ask not just what’s next but how you want to finish. What does your last tattoo look like, and how do you get there with intention and dignity?

Tattoo Pathway is constantly working with people toward that third stage, meeting them wherever they are and moving them gently toward a place where what they’re wearing makes sense to them, feels true, and offers some kind of coherent track through their life.

It has to be learned

I had a client come in not long ago who had found my work through the geometry I do. He wanted to cover and rework some tattoos from an overseas trip, which we did into a full leg sleeve, still in progress. As we worked through it I started to see patterns in how he related to those tattoos that also showed up in his existing sleeve, done by a genuinely good artist at significant cost. But the way he and that artist had related through the process had left him not just unsatisfied but a little scarred. Some residue he couldn’t quite get his head around.

We unpacked it. Reworked some things. And a few sessions in he said something that stuck with me: you have to learn how to get tattooed.

That’s exactly it. That relational aspect isn’t passive. It’s a skill. It develops over time with attention and honesty. And it changes everything about the quality of what you end up with, and how you carry it.

Introduction to the series:

Next in the series: Principle Two: Intention