00:00I think I like the experience of getting tattooed maybe more than I like sex.
00:17I have only two tattoos. They are on my arms.
00:21I have at least ten tattoos.
00:23One, two, three, four...
00:26five tattoos and counting.
00:29I think as a black woman I grew up with my body being something for other people to consume
00:35and for other people to do with.
00:38And so to take charge of what my body looks like is to say to everybody else, no.
00:44I feel like at a young age I've had this mentality of no one can tell me what to do
00:49with my body.
00:50It's been a decade since I've been collecting.
00:51When I was ten years old, I had my own tattoo pop-up shop on my grandmom's porch.
00:57I got my first tattoo when I was, I think, 16.
01:01So when I think about the first tattoo I ever wanted, I think about being 13 years old.
01:05And I wanted like a butterfly on my hip.
01:08So glad that my mother was like, absolutely not.
01:12First tattoo I have covered up.
01:14I was like, you know what, I'm gonna get a tattoo and I'm gonna get it today.
01:17I ended up getting a cauldron on my side.
01:20As he was doing it, he was rushing.
01:23I felt empty leaving the parlor.
01:25It served me, that version of myself.
01:29So I'm not gonna cover it up.
01:30First tattoo I ever got is Imani.
01:33It's my sister's name and my band's name.
01:35I've always had a theme of black excellence.
01:39My dad took me to get my first tattoo.
01:41My first tattoo was the one on my wrist.
01:44It says self.
01:46So it's just a reminder to continuously pour into myself before pouring into others.
01:51This is my first tattoo.
01:53This is Hepshet's suit.
01:54She is a female pharaoh.
01:56She's one of the first great female leaders we have written record of.
02:00And she was the black woman.
02:01So of course I had to get shit-tatted on me.
02:03I'm not sure that my tattoos are important for other people.
02:07They're mostly important for me.
02:09My tattoos kind of guide people into knowing how to approach me.
02:15My tattoos are a visual representation of myself.
02:19For me, since tattoos are a lot about owning my body,
02:23that the experience of where I get tattooed is huge.
02:25My first tattoo was a journey in so many ways.
02:29I really, really wanted a black femme tattoo artist.
02:32I feel like I've had my shared experience of getting a tattoo where I didn't feel comfortable.
02:38Tattoo artists need to be really aware of what it means to tattoo a person of color.
02:45Because you are performing a violent act.
02:48And at the same time, tattooing is a really healing process.
02:51As black women, we carry around so much history and so much trauma in our bodies.
02:55This tattooing process can be a really beautiful place to investigate that.
02:59It's important to me to get tattooed by other black women tattoo artists.
03:04Because it's inspiring.
03:07It makes me feel like I have someone that I've connected with.
03:11I love image making.
03:13And I love the practice of tattooing.
03:15But as a whole, what does it mean for me to be involved in this community?
03:20The biggest difficulty with tattoos for me has not been about any specific experience.
03:27Like most things for black women, it's about a lack.
03:30There's a lack of resources.
03:33There's a lack of people uplifting black tattoo artists.
03:37I wasn't seeing very many people of my skin complexion being heavily tattooed.
03:42I think it's important to see tattoos done on skin other than white.
03:47Black people can get color.
03:48A lot of people don't want to do it because sometimes it might be harder to see through
03:56just wiping the ink away.
03:58For me, I've spent a lot of time researching tattoo artists of color.
04:02When I have access to women of color in any aspect of my life and I can pay them for
04:07something,
04:08that's who I'm going to try to pay.
04:09And if it's permanently on my body, it's like I'm carrying around this receipt of my conscious.
