Every day during lockdown Samantha Barry, the editor of Glamour Magazine, walked or ran along the West Side Highway in New York City. “I would go from Chelsea to the Statue of Liberty, ” she said. “This was my moment of sanity every day.”
This was the longest she had ever spent in New York City without leaving to visit her family in Ireland. During the pandemic, she developed a greater appreciation for the place that is now her home.
She had always admired tattoos. “Done right, they look a little bit like jewelry, ” said Ms. Barry, 39. But she never had a compelling idea of what to get. “It has to mean something to have it permanently etched on your body.”
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Now, however, she knew exactly what she wanted: a sleek, tiny New York City skyline. Jonathan Valena, a tattoo artist known as JonBoy who works out of the Moxy Times Square hotel, tattooed it on her wrist at the end of 2020.
“We will talk about 2020 when we are old and gray, and now I have something on my body that symbolizes where I was, ” she said. “This is my way to recognize it.”
While the pandemic may be a time many want to forget, others are doing the opposite, getting tattoos to commemorate their experiences. Some are marking where they spent the year or a lesson they learned from the turmoil. Some Covid-19 survivors are getting tattoos that remind them they are alive and have strength. Some people are getting tattoos to memorialize those they lost.
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“I remember the day Sam got her tattoo, ” Mr. Valena said. “She represented the strength of New York and taught me I wasn’t alone.”
Ms. Barry said that many New Yorkers notice her tattoo when she’s on a Zoom call. “Everyone loves it, ” she said. “They all try to pick out the buildings on the skyline.”
Mr. Valena said 90 percent of his clients come to him for their first tattoo, and in the aftermath of the pandemic, he’s seen a surge in requests for Covid-related designs.
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When these clients come into Mr. Valena's studio, they are ready to talk. Just the process of getting a tattoo can be therapeutic. “They tell me their stories, and I am there to listen, ” he said. “I have that time with them when they can unload, and it’s pretty special.” They have an urgency to them, like they don’t want to put off getting one any longer. “People are getting words that have spoken to them, stuff like ‘surrender’ and ‘strength, ’” he said. “One of my clients, his father passed from Covid, and he ended up getting a rose for him.”
“I was hospitalized seven times, ” said Rachael Sunshine, 44, who lives in Coxsackie, N.Y. She has a degenerative nerve disease, which put her at a high risk for getting a serious case of the virus. “When Covid struck, I was one of those people who were supposed to die if they caught it.”
Against the odds she survived Covid not once but twice, she said. The virus damaged her heart, and she then survived heart surgery as well.
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On May 26, 2021, her 44th birthday, she went to Cape Cod, Mass., to celebrate surviving and got a tattoo of a heart surrounded by coronavirus spike proteins, which is the logo of Survivor Corps, a group that connects Covid-19 survivors. “The tears were just coming down my eyes, ” she said. “I said to the artist, ‘This has been such a long year.’ We talked for two hours about all the stuff I went through.
“People are like, ‘Why do you want this constant reminder of what you went through?’” she said. “I tell them I already have constant reminders. I have scars from getting heart surgery. I have to take medicine. I still can’t walk down the street normally. I am still battling it, so this is my warrior badge. When people 10 years from now talk about Covid, I am going to say, ‘I beat it.’”
Courtney Henley, 48, the founder of Henley Content Lab, had a less serious case. But she was still terrified when she contracted the virus in March 2020. “Every hour I was checking my temperature, making sure I could still breathe, ” she said. “I heard ambulances outside the whole time, all day every day.”
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This past spring, she got multiple tattoos that reminded her to celebrate every day. Among others were three black-and-white butterflies in different stages of flight and the Sanskrit symbol for ‘breathe.’ “I want to remember to breathe more, ” Ms. Henley said. “You can get so stressed you forget to breathe.”
Katie Tompkins, 28, works for a medical lab in Warren, Mich. She saw firsthand how serious and costly this pandemic was. “I worked in the lab that ran all the tests, and to see all the crazy things this virus was doing to people, it was just wild, ” she said.
She will never forget what she went through. But instead of focusing on the negative, she decided to try to bring some humor to the situation and get a tattoo of toilet paper on the inside of her left elbow. “I have such memories walking into the store and there being bare shelves everywhere because everyone was stockpiling toilet paper, ” she said. “It was just insane.”
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It was her first tattoo, and she has bonded with strangers over it. They stop her to share their own toilet paper stories.
Most important, the image makes her smile and giggle, things she wants to do more of now that she is vaccinated. “I wanted to have something to look at and go, ‘Oh my God, remember when all that crazy stuff happened?’” she said. “It’s my way of bringing light to a not great situation.”I f one thing has become obvious in the summer heat and the inevitable baring of flesh, it’s the degree to which body art is now the norm. At the pool, the park, or the pub beer garden, you’ll find an enormous variety of designs inked on the skin representing the breadth of human creativity.
About 20% of adults in the UK now have at least one tattoo, and that proportion is likely to grow. Cynics might argue that the increased uptake is a superficial fad, based purely on the aesthetic appeal of tattoos. In this view, they might be the result of a momentary impulse to follow a passing trend followed by years of regret, rather than something that holds deep meaning.
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Prof Viren Swami, a psychologist at Anglia Ruskin University who studies body image, thinks that these superficial explanations are highly unlikely. “Given their permanence, and the pain that’s involved, and the planning that often goes into getting a tattoo, it’s very difficult to conceptualise tattooing as a fashion accessory, ” he says.
In his opinion, it is far more interesting to examine the ways that people use body art for self-realisation, as artistic endeavours that are expressions of identity, body ownership, and personal growth. Many are now finding that tattoos are a particularly apt way of marking a bereavement – a means of holding the loved one close after death.
Like any art form, tattooing should be understood in its historical and cultural context. Our ancestors seem to have recognised the skin as a canvas since time immemorial. The oldest definitive proof of body art comes from Ötzi, the 5, 300-year-old body of a man who remained frozen in a glacier near Bolzano, Italy, until it was discovered by two hikers in 1991. He bore 61 tattoos of geometric designs across his left wrist, lower legs, lower back, and his torso. Ancient body art – dating from at least 3, 000 years ago – has also been found in human remains from Egypt, Russia, China and Chile.
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Given how widespread tattooing is – and apparently always has been – some psychologists have suggested it may have an evolutionary purpose. According to one theory, you would have needed to have a robust immune system to survive the danger of infection after getting your skin inked; if you survived, it could show that you had good genes to pass on to your children. In this way, it acted as a fitness signal, making you more sexually attractive to prospective partners. Swami, however, is unconvinced by the theory. “I think it’s much easier to understand tattooing from a social and cultural perspective than it is from an evolutionary perspective, ” he says. In other words, it is the way we use body art to express ourselves, within a particular context, that really matters.
The history of body art in Britain has been rather chequered. There are records of tattoos on indigenous Britons at time of Caesar’s invasion. Indeed, the practice was so widespread that the name Britain is likely to be derived from the Celtic word
Swami explains that tattoos gained renewed popularity after Captain Cook’s exploration of the Pacific, as sailors returned with designs inked by the people they encountered. “The twist in this
