I had a very interesting conversation with a tattoo artist lately. I was visiting this artist for the second sitting for my arm sleeve (a fish and aquatic animal-themed sleeve on my left arm). This sleeve will likely take about five sessions in total, and will probably cost me somewhere in the vicinity of 3,500 AUD (2,000 USD).

This tattoo artist, like all of my tattoo artists, was heavily tattooed themself. We were making small talk by discussing each other’s existing tattoos. They made a comment that I found very interesting: “I want more tattoos, but I can’t afford them right now.”

This is so interesting to me! A tattoo artist, who produces tattoos every day, cannot afford to obtain their own work.

I’ve heard from several tattoo artists that the tattoo industry in Australia has been slow over the past couple of years, and this seems to have been exacerbated by an increasing cost of living. However, throughout history, tattoos have generally been expensive to acquire.

In The Other End of the Needle: Continuity and Change Among Tattoo Workers, David C. Lane highlights an episode in the history of tattooing that I find very interesting:

In the late 1880s and 1890s, Europe and the United States experi-enced a fad of tattoo consumption among elites. Some of the earliest adopt-ers in this fad included the Prince of Wales, Lady Randolph Churchill (and much later, her son, Winston), King George V and King Edward VII (United Kingdom), Czar Nicholas II (Russia), and Prince Henry (Prussia). Elites paid much higher prices for tattoos, preferred the term skin tinting instead of tattooing, and had tattooists produce their family names, crests, monograms, symbols of wealth and status, scenes that depicted elite life, and animals. All these images represented their position in the system of stratification. [I]n the late 19th century, tattoo machines were created, and a new culture formed around their use. Tattoos could now be produced more efficiently, since tattoos made by machines required less time and effort than hand tools and damaged the skin less. In a sense, the craft itself changed in a way that made it more difficult for elites to define tattoos as a form of leisure consumption.

In the introduction to Tattoo Histories: Transcultural Perspectives on the Narratives, Practices, and Representations of Tattooing, Sinah Theres Kloß distinguishes between tattoo art and low-culture tattooing (which, under this definition, includes flash tattoos). I find this interesting because the dynamic is similar to the upper-class tattooing mentioned above:

Tattoo art […] is designed individually by a tattoo artist and produced in art studios and by appointment. Tattoo art and its opposition to an assumed low-culture tattooing has become a means of social distinction, of generating cultural capital (a tattooee shows knowledge of (high) tattoo art and how to acquire a good-quality tattoo), social capital (a tattooee knows and has access to specific tattoo artists), and economic capital (a tattooee can afford the cost of tattoo art).

In the final chapter of Drawing with Great Needles: Ancient Tattoo Traditions of North America, David H. Dye offers this interesting tidbit about the economics of tattooing among the Osage Nation:

[T]attoos on Osage women were far more elaborate and extensive than those on men. […] Tattooing was restricted to the eldest daughtersof the best families. […] Women’s tattoos covered most of their bodies, making their tattoos more expensive and painful than those of men. Many gifts had to be paid to the great Bundle priests who performed the tattooing.

There have been, and remain, pockets of affordability. For example, tattoos obtained from a fellow soldier in the military or a fellow sailor in the navy might be very affordable. Flash tattoos—that is, tattoos that are ready-drawn on flash sheets and selected by the customer from multiple options, as opposed to custom pieces designed for a single customer—have historically been quite cheap.

In The Other End of the Needle, David C. Lane identifies a group of tattooists that he calls “shopless”:

Shopless describes those who are relatively low skilled and who do not work in tattoo shops. These tattooists occupy the lowest position in this world. Established tattooists deem the shopless and scratchers outsiders and unfit to work.

However, Lane notes that shopless tattooists, despite being rejected as legitimate by other tattooists, might provide services that those tattooists cannot:

Mobility allows shopless to provide services to a segment of consumers who would not ordinarily meet tattooists. They can reach people who are unwilling or unable to enter a tattoo shop and those who could not afford the prices in a tattoo shop.

Update 2025-05-20

The masterpiece by Lars Krutak, Tattoo Traditions of Asia: Ancient and Contemporary Expressions of Identity, contains these two fascinating examples.

Writing about the Paiwan people, who are indigenous to Taiwan, Krutak reports:

[…] [T]he cost of tattooing a man’schest, back, and both arms was high: one pig, two iron rakes, four knives, an ax, one roll of cloth, one porcelain bowl, and a bottle of millet wine. Other sources report that payment wasakin to the costs of a dowry and included four guns, good-quality clothes, a large pitchfork, a pot,a large iron cooking wok, a reaping sickle, porcelain bowls, alcoholic drinks, and a pig.

Regarding the Mentawai people in Indonesia:

[…] [S]ome Mentawai people who wish to get tattooed cannot afford these expensive markings. For example, the cost of a full suite of tattoos in Buttui, which may take almost a lifetime to receive, is high by Mentawaian standards: 1 medium size pig; 1 durian tree; 4 sago palm trees; 1 coconut palm tree; and 1 chicken basket with several chicks!

Update 2025-06-02

Two more interesting tidbits.

Shoham (2015) writes about tattoo cultures among imprisoned people from the former Soviet Union:

While Russian criminals pay large amounts of money for their tattoos, a tattooist in a Russian prison will accept payment in cigarettes, food, or a few rubles.

Lynn et al 2018 examine how tattoos are costly not in an economic sense, but in an evolutionary and biological sense:

Evolutionary theorists have posited two complementary hypotheses for the popularity of tattooing and piercing in the face of less dangerous options. The Bhuman canvas hypothesis^ suggests that tattooing and piercing may be hard-to-fake conscious or unconscious advertisements of fitness or affiliations. The Bupping the ante hypothesis^ proposes that tattooing and piercing are costly honest signals of good genes in that they injure the body to show how well it heals.