There Will be Blood: Exploring Embodied Labor by Learning the Craft

Blood and Lightning: On Becoming a Tattooer By Dustin Kiskaddon (Stanford University Press, 2024). Tattooers are historically quite wary of curious outsiders who ask too many questions about their trade. Even after many of their secrets have been spilled in television series and on social media, practitioners of this colorful craft have held fast to the need for some mystery surrounding their practices. Whether motivated by financial self-interest, or in order to preserve the glamour that provides tattooing spaces with their aura of fun and danger, the esoterica of these scab palaces remain cloistered behind metaphorical gates and their ever-present keepers. This fact is often repeated in the sociology of tattooing and is usually presented as the first obstacle to an ethnographic or interpretivist understanding to the subject. While many of us who have studied tattooers have developed creative methodological inroads around this, Dustin Kiskaddon's fix—to become a tattooist himself—carries not only the advantage of novelty, but the opportunity to provide a radical shift in the academic perspective he brings to this interesting and timely addition to the scholarship on this area. One of the lead characters in this gripping ethnography is Matt, who acted as Kiskaddon's tattoo mentor and anthropological informant. He captures the excitement of tattooing with his trademark flair for the dramatic: “We deal in blood. We brandish lightning” (p. 22). While he maintains his tat dad's own reverent tone toward the distinctiveness of tattooing, Kiskaddon's contribution to the sociology on this topic ultimately emerges from balancing this against a careful examination of tattooing as a craft. Like other crafts, the author explores how the tattooer's work is accomplished through the tedious work of mastering its very mundane techniques (p. 25). Although it may appear exotic or dangerous to the uninitiated, the tattooist exists in a work world co-occupied by hairstylists, masseuses, personal trainers, dentists, sex workers, and others who earn a living at the “intimate, carnal” intersection of people, bodies, and money (p. 10). As with past scholars who asked us to consider drug dealing and exotic dancing not as forms of deviance but case studies in the sociology of work, Kiskaddon locates tattooing within the field of body labor. Across a series of well-written chapters, the author unpacks key events in the contemporary tattoo industry: the controversy around the new trend of for-profit “tattoo schools,” the COVID pandemic, the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the #MeToo reckoning that left no corner of our culture untouched. Kiskaddon uses these phenomena to illustrate the way that tattooing as a practice (or set of practices) draws attention to the role played by embodied knowledge, forms of social attention, emotional labor, and professional ethics that overlap with other workers who similarly operate at the people-bodies-money nexus. With both humor and a keen eye for analysis, Chapter 7 (“How Much for a Face Tattoo?”) discusses when tattooers will and will not mark-up hands, faces, and necks. Describing what he calls an “ethic of refusal,” Kiskaddon considers how tattooers cultivate this ethic while highlighting the ways that tattooists are like many workers who do things they would rather not do because their economic livelihood depends on it (p. 192). Blood and Lightning offers an entertaining vantage into the work of tattooing that owes much to the vivid and impressive data upon which it is built. Drawing from detailed notes about the shop at which he apprenticed and worked as a tattooer, his interactions with many other tattooers outside of his own workplace, and more than 20 formal interviews, Kiskaddon pieces together a close-up image of a work world in the midst of a transition. The tattoo world's nascent transformation from the hegemony of White, straight cis-men who represent the toxic elements of tattoo culture—the aptly named “douchebag-fucking-bro club” (p. 45)—to one where issues of respect, consent, and bodily autonomy (for both clients and artisans) have become increasingly salient coincides with the evolution of our social world more generally. In Chapter 2 (“You Should Be Scared”), Kiskaddon also differentiates tattooing as a type of embodied labor by emphasizing the permanence of their work, versus others who make money through work that involve intimate interactions with others' human bodies (p. 79). This theme is explored further in Chapters 6 (“Mispld and Other Mistakes”) and in the Conclusion (subtitled “The Unleavable Field”). The temporal dimension of tattoo work not only relates to the indelibility of the tattoos themselves, but is illustrated by the embodied knowledge about which Kiskaddon muses, and his direct acquaintance with the potential long-term consequences of tattooing as a form of body labor: hearing loss, chronic vulnerability to illness, and the precariousness of a job that depends on co-existing in physical space with others, to name a few. However, there are times in the book where Kiskaddon is more focused on demonstrating the degree of insidership he achieved with his method, rather than offering a deeper interrogation of the conceptual themes his (very rich) data could support. For example, in telling the story of a misspelled inner-lip tattoo he teases a discussion of the “hairline crack” formed by this error in the collective production of the shop's atmosphere (p. 156) but moves on before expanding upon the Goffmanian show tattooers call “the glamour” (p. 17) and its broader analytic implications. Much of Blood and Lightning dealt directly with the physical and social facts of bodies (Chapters 3, 4, and 5 in particular), including a long-overdue discussion of the way race imbues the norms of Western tattoo culture. As the author very succinctly describes: “Tattooing can bring the physical and cultural elements of skin to the surface, forcing everyone involved to notice, talk, and work with it directly” (p. 125). Many of these vignettes speak poignantly to the pervasiveness of racism in US culture by revealing how awkward and unlikely it is for White and Black strangers to address race in casual interactions. Chapter 5 grapples with the irony that although tattooing was invented by and for dark-skinned people, US tattooers (who are White more often than not) find dark skin “hard” to tattoo. To his credit, Kiskaddon does begin to unravel the way that seemingly technical aspects of tattooing are linked to the social reality of race more so than the biological fact of melanin. Yet this tends to get lost in thick description overpopulated by technical detail that crowds out conceptual nuance. On the other hand, Kiskaddon's lighter theoretical framework must certainly increase the wider appeal of this book for readers with a more general curiosity about the world of tattooing. Blood and Lightning is a crisply written study that immerses the reader in sensory detail. Dustin Kiskaddon takes full advantage of his unique methodological strategy, making his own body the field for data collection in order to provide an intimate portrait of a work world in a strange historical moment. Kiskaddon's first-hand perspective adds depth and dimension to the sociology of tattooing and the sociology of work. William Ryan Force is Assistant Professor of Sociology at California State University, Fresno. As a student of social life, his research and teaching explore the accomplishment of identity and culture. He has studied a variety of empirical contexts: tattoo culture, punk/indie rock, transgressive TV, bar culture, trick-or-treating, and the supernatural. Dr. Force's work has appeared as book chapters and in journals including Deviant Behavior, Symbolic Interaction, and Crime, Media, Culture. His current research examines tattoo culture, social media, and cognitive sociology.