Getting a tattoo, that’s a painful day out

In the center of Apeldoorn, the Black Sword Tattoo Parlor has just opened at half past ten. Pictures of swords, pistols, crucifixes hang on the black-painted walls. In the basement, where there is a staff room, are two ‘stuffed’ ravens – one with two heads and the other with four wings. The first visitors arrive. They are, as it turns out, youth workers, logistics managers, gas station employees, students. And almost all of them are regular customers.

The tattoo wave seems unstoppable. Just a little while, and anyone lying on the beach in the summer without tattoos is a rarity. No subculture: it’s mainstream, the folk art of the Anthropocene. “We get everything in here, literally from lawyer to criminal,” says Yara Busropan (40) who stands behind the counter at Black Sword, an old-fashioned wooden counter with glass display cases. The latest trend: “intimate things”: flowers, words, hearts in a thin line. “No idea where that comes from.”

There is still a “generation difference,” says Busropan. His now 73-year-old mother cried when she first saw his neck tattoo. “She said: ‘why does it have to be so visible’. She thinks it’s self-mutilation.” He will understand again. “In her time it was something about criminals and sailors, people who are just outside society.”

He never asks about the meaning of tattoos customers want, even if he doesn’t understand it. “I’m just checking to see if it’s tattooable.” There is, however, an age limit. Under the age of sixteen is “absolutely not tattooed” in the Black Sword Tattoo Parlour, the terms say. The minimum age in the Netherlands is twelve (with the permission of a parent or guardian, in non-visible places), which Busropan thinks is on the young side. “So many rules about ink, about hygiene, but you can get a tattoo when you are twelve.” A tattoo is forever, they say here. For those who think otherwise, there is a saw in a display case of the counter with the text ‘Tattoo Removal’ on the blade.

We get everything in here, literally from lawyer to criminal

Yara Busropan (40) employee Black Sword

Devil and Angel

Sem van Ginkel (19) from Ugchelen, long blond hair, wide red pants, spends a day in a tattoo shop. She is studying management at college and is coming for her ninth tattoo. The middle of winter is a good time, “in the summer it is more difficult that you are not allowed to put the wound in the sun or in the water for six weeks”. It becomes two women’s heads together, devil and angel. Tattoo artist Manouk Fofo (28) is working on the design in the basement, Sem is her only customer today. A price has not yet been agreed. The daily rate is 1,000 to 1,500 euros, it will not be cheap. But Sem is happy to give the money for it. “This will really be someone’s creation, it’s not a standard tattoo.” She has a good part-time job at a care institution and can afford it.

The right lower leg of youth worker Kevin (36) is a multi-year project. “Once in a while I schedule an appointment, then we add something nice.” Kevin (he prefers not to use his last name NRC) is wearing a black tracksuit with the inscriptions ‘Arsenal’ and ‘Emirates Fly Better’ and has one pant leg rolled up. The multicolored tattoo is part abstract, part figurative. The face of his daughter (now four years old) can be seen, and the words: ‘not your girl‘. “Because she will always be a part of me.” Did he come up with the tattoo himself? “I deliver ideas, Matt makes his design out of that. I do give him artistic freedom, it is also a matter of trust.”

Matt is Matthew Luhukay (40), the owner of the Black Sword Tattoo Parlor – he has a vertical sword on the right side of his face. Luhukay had not started the business five years ago or he came second in the TV competition Inkmaster. They first did the shop with the three of them, now with the nine of them. Year after year they score almost tens on customer friendliness.

Luhukay takes a needle to graffiti the words Be Noble into Kevin’s leg. “Good luck,” says Kevin. They punch each other.

super happy

There is no recognized tattoo training in the Netherlands. There are courses, but most tattoo artists teach themselves the trade with the help of experienced colleagues. Michael Kranen (29, shop name Mikkel) worked in warehouses, factories and slaughterhouses after high school, “I had no idea what I wanted to be”. As he continued to draw and tattoo, his father eventually bought tattoo equipment and practiced on family and friends. He started here three years ago. “I’m super happy,” he says. “Nice colleagues, it really is one team. Almost all of us have children, we are all family people.”

The son and daughter of colleague Javier Montilla (29, shop name Monti) live in Venezuela, he left to earn money. After periods in Curaçao and Bilbao, he settled in Apeldoorn, where he will soon start Dutch lessons. He is an engineer – his mother made him finish his education – but has always preferred to draw. He also makes oil paintings. “I don’t like tattoos that people get because they’re fashionable,” he says. “A tattoo should be original and personal. I try to make something for people that really belongs to them, so that they come back to me.” He is proud of the large, colorful tattoo he got on the left thigh of Kranen, who otherwise only has tattoos in shades of gray. It is a face in three layers, the middle part in the shape of a skull. It took him 23 hours.

Lightning bolts

There is a lot of love in tattoos, from both the makers and the recipients. Kevin’s first tattoo was his father’s initials. “I lived with him for a long time with my sister, my parents are divorced.”

On the arm of psychiatric nurse Angéla Spaan (26) is written ‘I love you’ in the handwriting of her deceased grandmother. That tattoo means more to her than the urn with her grandmother’s ashes she has at home, she says. “When I’m not doing well, I just look at my arm and I know it’s going to be okay.”

Michael Kranen pumps up the treatment chair in which Celesta Kamphuis (20) is nervously waiting for her first tattoo. She has a fear of needles. “I’m just going to start quietly,” says Kranen, “if you want me to stop, you have to say so.” There will be four intertwined hearts on her forearm. Three are for her parents and her brother, the fourth is half for herself and half for her best friend, who died in a car accident two years ago. “I didn’t want a separate tattoo for him, then you can put one for everyone who dies.” The pain is not too bad, she says after about five minutes, “I expected worse”. After a quarter of an hour it is still waived. “It’s that I like him,” she says about Kranen, “otherwise he would have been hit.”

The fact that pain is suffered is hardly noticeable in the salon, at most some people stare very grimly at their phone. Manouk Fofo tattoos the first contours of a woman’s face with horns in Sem van Ginkel’s lower leg. He says it tickles. “You are crazy,” Kevin responds in the chair across from her. He thinks a lower leg tattoo “is not so nice, it is very sensitive”. “But that’s the worst” – he nods to a girl who lies horizontally like an operation patient for lightning bolts on her ribs, the most painful place in his opinion. “I’m never really going to start that.” Cheerful: “Women can handle pain better anyway.”

Coping mechanism

Noa Westhof (19), who has the lightning bolts installed, works at a gas station and is almost the only one in her family with tattoos, she says. She got the first one from her parents when she was eighteen. Why does she want more now? “I kind of forgot how it felt. And in winter I am more sad. It’s a kind of coping mechanism. A way to divert the pain in your head to another place.” She also gets a snake with dandruff on her forearm today. “I have liked that for a long time. Just sick.”

It’s getting busy in the shop. Sem van Ginkel goes to buy some food, and brings Vietnamese spring rolls for Noa and her friend Chayenne who came by for support. Noa and Chayenne have had the same rose with stem placed on the inside of their forearm as a token of friendship. Noa: “People say: what if you are no longer friends.” Chayenne: “But then you still have a tattoo with someone with whom you have good memories.”

Two other girlfriends come in without an appointment for a bow and arrow and a grayscale disco ball. Mikkel takes care of one, Monti the other.

Angéla Spaan came from Zutphen to Apeldoorn on her day off to make a new appointment. She wants some faded lines touched up on the sleeve she got done last fall, and she wants three new tattoos. “Okay, nice picture,” says Yara Busropan about an image she shows him at the counter. “Back of calf?” He kneels down behind her, measures with thumb and forefinger how big she wants it, calculates a price, asks for a deposit of 100 euros. There is only room in April. “Then we also do the updating,” he says. “You can go into the summer like new.”

photos Saskia van den Boom