When Medill senior Kelly Rappaport first stepped into a tattoo parlor the summer before her freshman year of college, she knew that she wanted some kind of significant artwork: She decided to ink pop artist Keith Haring’s cartoon-style dancing figures on her bicep.
“I live and breathe everything creative, and the accessibility of art is very important to me, that they’re not locked away or that you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to own art,” she said. “That’s very central to who Keith Haring was as an artist.”
Haring was a New York City artist known for his activism around issues like the AIDS pandemic and drug abuse. Rappaport, a former Daily staffer, said she was drawn to tattoos depicting pop culture, representing how art should be approachable.
Since acquiring Haring’s iconography, Rappaport has gotten four more tattoos, from a miniature recreation of a Pablo Picasso painting to Andy Warhol’s banana that appears on the Velvet Underground album cover.
These intricate designs require the expertise of Chicago-based studios like Lucky Kat Tattoo in River West and Good Mood Tattoo in Pilsen.
In the U.S., 41% of people under age 30 have at least one tattoo, according to Pew Research Center. Rappaport said to ensure that she still appreciates her tattoos decades from now, she picks artwork with lasting appeal.
“Many of these art pieces have been hung in museums for, you know, hundreds of years,” she said. “They’re timeless.”
Tattoos can also hold sentimental or symbolic value. Each of Weinberg freshman Sailor Akohonae’s four tattoos depict a different aspect of herself, from an anchor representing her name to a silhouette of her and her brother.
For Akohonae, they’re just another way to style her body.
“It’s like another decoration,” she said. “You can do your clothes, you can do your jewelry. You can also do tattoos.”
Unlike clothing and accessories, tattoos are permanent, which Weinberg freshman Fima Furman said has caused her to regret her only tattoo, that of a cartoon.
“It’s a frog with a sad expression looking through an empty wine glass, and you can see the reflection in the glass,” Furman said. “So it’s artistically cool and it’s goofy.”
Inked on her ankle, Furman decided to get a matching tattoo with her brother while they were on a family vacation in Spain. She was 16 at the time — the legal minimum age to get a tattoo in Spain — but said she wished that she had waited to decide on a design with more significance.
“It is on my body forever, and I just wish it had more meaning,” she said.
As someone who plans to go into medicine, Furman said she knew that she wanted to place her tattoo where scrubs could cover it.
Although many companies have relaxed their tattoo policies in recent years — in 2021, Disney and UPS relaxed their policies to allow employees to display visible tattoos — Furman said she cannot control how a patient might react.
“I don’t want to be thought of as less professional or trusted less by my patients,” she said. “There’s no way to predict how patients will feel about tattoos, and I would never want someone to feel less comfortable and less trusting in my professional judgment.”
Akohonae said the stigma surrounding tattoos has contributed to unfounded employer discrimination. Since tattoos do not impact job productivity, they should not factor into employment decisions, she added.
Still, she said she intentionally placed all of her tattoos in places she can easily cover for a job interview.
“I understand that some places want to keep a certain look, and that’s fine for them,” she said. “But, tattoos don’t actually impair any sense of judgment or any work ethic.”
Email: [email protected]
Related Stories:
— ‘A piece of the puzzle to Evanston’: City welcomes only tattoo shop
— Northwestern students travel to Chicago for tattoos
— ‘Spiritual and radical becoming’: APIDA artists discuss using tattoos to collect stories on skin
