Palm Sized

About this collection

My first tattoo is a crude equal sign done by a friend in her bedroom when we were 16. The next 15 years of my life were spent circling tattoos and tattooing both in the form of giving them (bad at first, like really bad) to getting them (also bad at first); and learning about them from a historical cultural perspective as well as an ever evolving contemporary art form. Tattoos became a part of my social fabric, a bonding exercise, a reason to travel, a way of connecting to people around me as well as myself, a folk practice. And sometimes tattooing was just for fun or out of sheer boredom and a desire to get better at a craft. At 21 I gave myself my first tattoo: a mandarin orange above my ankle. Also in a bedroom, but this time much better.

In grad school I began to think about tattoos on a much more macro scale and critically as folk art and cultural artifacts-- were they being preserved and if so how were they being described? Turns out there are not many collections and description standards are slim. Out of this came a zine Palm Size wherein I began to build a metadata schema for describing tattoos and their associated designs (flash sheets, stencils, portfolios, etc.). This zine along with a selection of photographs of hand poke tattoos and flash sheets I've done (2018-2021) comprises the beginning of a retrospective on my practice.