When Monique Dillard got her first tattoo 14 years ago, she had two fears: that it would be intensely painful and that the colored ink would look dull on her light brown skin.
Neither happened, and Dillard became addicted to getting tattooed.
“It’s a rush,” she said. “Like sex.”
As her skin art collection grew, Dillard got strange looks from fellow black students at college. Word came back to her that a few of them thought she was “trying to be white.”
“I was one of the few black people, let alone black women, who had tattoos,” said Dillard, 34, a cosmetologist who lives in Washington.
She now has 11 boldly colored images permanently etched onto her chest, back, stomach and arms. Most of them are tributes: five panthers, in memory of dead relatives, and the numbers 1 and 4 surrounded by flames on her inner left forearm, a reminder of the street where she grew up.
There was a time when tattoo artists dealt almost exclusively with white men. Now, thanks to celebrities and reality TV shows “Miami Ink” and “Inked,” body art has burst into the mainstream.
“I notice now a lot more African-American people are getting tattoos, especially females,” Dillard said.
One recent survey found that more than 36 percent of Americans ages 18 to 25 have at least one tattoo. Blacks are a growing part of those tattooed twentysomethings, according to a recent Harris Poll.
The industry is adjusting to the tastes and needs of dark-skinned customers.
Earlier this year, the publisher of Skin & Ink magazine put out the first issue of Urban Ink: A Tattoo Magazine for People of Color.
The first issue of the magazine featured images, definitions and the names of 11 traditional symbols of the Asante people of Ghana and the Gyaman people of the Ivory Coast. It included do’s and don’t’s for tattoos on dark skin and features on branding and other body modifications.
Body modification in one form or another can be found in the histories of many ethnic groups. It once signified, and in some cases still forms part of, rites of passage — the initiation of an individual into a tribe.
Yet due to the difficulty of getting ink to show up on dark skin, very dark-skinned people tended to eschew tattooing in favor of skin art that was more visible on their complexion, such as scarification.
“In most parts of Africa, scarification, by simply incising the skin in a specific pattern, is the body modification of choice,” Dr. John Rush, an anthropologist and the author of “Spiritual Tattoo: A Cultural History of Tattooing, Piercing, Scarification, Branding and Implants,” wrote in an e-mail.
After its importation to Western culture, tatooing moved away from its roots and for the most part became an individual statement rather than a group one, historians say.
African descendants in the West, many of whom had adopted Christianity, continued to avoid the practice for reasons other than the color of their skin. Tattooing had become associated with early seafaring ne’er-do-wells, who had picked up the practice from encounters with indigenous tribes in other parts of the world.
Later, black and Latino gang members used tattoos as group identification.
“That made tattooing seem negative, so it got pushed underground to where only bikers and criminals were getting tattooed,” said Roni Zulu, a tattoo artist who runs Zulu Tattoo in L.A.
Many black tattoo artists, like Martinez “Tinez” Cook of Body Design Tattoos studio in Tampa are self-taught and start their careers working underground, spending long hours tattooing in their homes or traveling to clients’ homes.
“Underground” tattooing is prominent with blacks because of the difficulty black artists have finding an apprenticeship in the white-dominated field, Zulu said. Although the National Tattoo Association doesn’t track the number of black-owned parlors, it is understood that they are few.
“Being in this industry and being black,” Cook said, “really almost turns you into a local celebrity. There ain’t too many of us. … Hell, now that I think about it, I don’t even know that many black tattoo artists.”
Zulu has become one of the nation’s renowned tattooists, black or white, with celebrity clients such as Janet Jackson, Dennis Rodman, Bruce Willis and Christina Aguilera, among others.
But when he left his graphic design gig 14 years ago to do tattoos, success seemed a distant possibility.
“There was a lot of hard-core hatred,” he said.
Nasty notes, bomb threats and face-to-face confrontations came to his shop almost daily from a close-knit community of good old boys who didn’t want him treading on their territory, Zulu said.
“I’m not a violent person, but it came to the point where I had to come to work with a gun strapped to my chest,” he said.
When the scare tactics failed and Zulu stayed, word spread, and his clientele grew. Blacks wanting tattoos with deeper meaning flocked to Zulu, one of a handful of black shop owners in the nation.
“It is slowly changing,” he said. “The younger generations are becoming less tolerant of bigotry.”
He draws only original tattoos and specializes in African symbols.
“Instead of eagles and anchors and sailor-type stuff, they were looking for something to do with their heritage,” Zulu said. “And that’s what I offer.”
Who’s who
MARKS VISIBLE TATTOOS IN IMAGE
Vanishingtatto.com, an online repository for just about anything tattoo-related, offers several lists about celebrities with tattoos. Here are some stars of color who sport some ink. [REDEYE]
LENNY KRAVITZ
USHER
BEYONCE
TYSON BECKFORD
HALLE BERRY
TYRESE
50 CENT
BEN HARPER
KOBE BRYANT
LIL KIM
LL COOL J
TAYE DIGS
D’ANGELO
DENNIS RODMAN
MICHAEL JORDAN
EVE
