The first thing that struck me, almost immediately, was how comfortable people were with their bodies. Not in a performative way, not in the way someone acts comfortable while clearly hoping people are watching, but genuinely, effortlessly at ease. People were getting their chests tattooed, their spines, their legs, their underboobs, right there in the open, in a room full of strangers. People of all different body sizes, all different shapes, sitting back in the chair and letting an artist work on them like it was the most natural thing in the world. Because for them, it was.
I’ll be honest, seeing that hit me harder than I expected it to. That kind of ease with your own body is something I can only aspire to. I am nowhere near that level of comfort with myself, and I think most people are not. We spend so much time worrying about how we look, whether we are taking up too much space, whether people are staring for the wrong reasons. And here were all these people who had simply decided not to care about any of that. Not because they had perfect bodies or because they had figured out some secret, but because they had made a choice. Their bodies belonged to them, and they were doing exactly what they wanted with them. That was it. No long explanation, no defence of their choices, just a quiet certainty that I found more confidence in than anything I had heard in a long time. It sounds simple, but there was something almost radical about it. We are so conditioned to seek approval, to wonder what people will think, to justify our choices to other people. These people had completely opted out of that whole system and honestly seemed completely at peace because of it.
Everyone there had that same quality to some degree. You could tell just by looking around that nobody was dressed for someone else. The outfits, the hair, the jewellery, all of it felt like it had been put together purely for the person wearing it and not for anyone else. There was no performance of what they thought they should look like, just a very clear sense of who they were and how they wanted to present that to the world. Everyone looked completely unique, and that uniqueness felt intentional in a way that you rarely see.
But what moved me the most, without a doubt, were the women. There were so many women there, getting tattooed in public, in various states of undress, completely unbothered by the fact that they were in a room full of people. There was something almost awe inspiring about it. Getting a tattoo is an intimate experience at the best of times, and to do it in a public setting, to sit in that chair and let people watch, takes a certain kind of courage that I think deserves to be acknowledged. They weren't hiding. They weren't shrinking. They were just there, fully present, fully themselves.
It reminded me, strangely, of standing in front of a painting in a gallery. The people getting tattooed at the show were both the canvas and the subject. They were displaying themselves, their stories, their choices, right there for everyone to see, and the tattoo artists were adding to something that was already a work of art. There was a quiet dignity to it that felt almost classical, the way a Renaissance painting commands your attention not because it demands it, but because there is so much humanity in it that you cannot look away.
Leaving the show, I felt something shift in me, not dramatically, not in a way that suddenly made me confident or fearless, but in a small, meaningful way. Being around people who have genuinely decided to stop apologising for who they are does something to you. It makes you wonder what you might look like if you stopped too.