the wordsmith
sarah james
return to old school tattoo methods
Since the invention of the tattoo machine in the early 1900s, there has been a general move away from the stick-and-poke method of tattooing.
Stick-and-poke involves manually puncturing the skin with an ink covered needle, so as to create a tattoo.
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Stick-and-pokes used to be more commonly done on young (sometimes more alternative) people while drunk. These tattoos are generally done by attaching a sewing needle to a pencil so as to get a good grip. The tip of the needle is wrapped in cotton thread so as to absorb the ink. The cotton wrapped needle is then dipped in ink and manually pushed into the skin to create small dots of ink. When done repeatedly, these dots will create the lines of the tattoo. Once this has been done once, the design needs to be gone over again, to fill in any spots which may have been missed on the first pass.
The ink used in these types of tattoos tends to be India ink which is widely used for drawing comic strips. Needles are also generally sterilized using a flame and are used more than once.
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In more recent years, there has been a considerable shift in this realm of tattooing with more and more people investing in stick-and-poke style tattoos, with professional tattoo shops even having specialized stick-and-poke artists. But why has there been this shift back to seemingly archaic tattooing?
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Despite stick-and-pokes being more time consuming, they are often quite a lot cheaper than professional tattoos, which tend to be pretty expensive. Due to these tattoos also usually being quite small, they are easy to conceal under clothes.
Some have also argued that the tattoo industry is a male-dominated industry and many women feel uncomfortable or intimidated by getting tattooed by men. Stick-and-pokes have the advantage that one can either tattoo oneself or ask a female friend to do so. Stick-and-pokes also give the opportunity to support non-traditional tattoo artists.
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Although the traditional method of stick-and-pokes was anyone at home using a sewing needle, there has been a rise of people learning how to do stick-and-pokes and who are also using more hygienic methods. These people tend to use proper tattoo needles and tattoo ink. These needles are sterile and are used only once. Tattoo ink is also specifically designed for tattoo use. Through this, tattoos are less likely to cause infection and the spread of diseases such as hepatitis and HIV/AIDS.
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My fellow Journalism student, Chloé Osmond, says that she was always interested in tattoos (both machine and stick-and-poke) but was very cautious about who she got the stick-and-poke from. She also thought a lot about the design and what would look good as a stick-and-poke tattoo. She followed her artist, Jomiro, on Instagram (@jomiroeming) for a considerable amount of time and really liked his stick-and-poke work.
Chloe's stick-and-poke tattoo
Chloé says that she preferred her experience of getting her stick-and-poke tattoo because her artist consulted her a lot in coming up with the design and took her comments into consideration while drawing up different versions of the design. She also commented that although the tattoo was done in the artist’s house, everything was performed in a sterile environment. She pointed out that stick-and-pokes have a bad reputation, due to often being done in non-sterile environments, and that it is also not regarded as an art form in itself.
Overall, I would say that people are favouring stick-and-poke because (depending on the size) they can be cheaper than traditional tattoos. They are also more informal so the client is able to relax a lot more. I think it is an interesting way of tattooing but you need to be extremely careful about who you go to to get these tattoos because you don’t want to end up with a bad design and badly executed tattoo that you can’t get rid of.