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“If I don’t do it now, I’m never going to do it,” blurts a woman breathlessly. She grabs one of the image-filled binders from the counter and flips to a page of Sanskrit lettering. “B, C, P,” she says, jabbing an index finger at each character. “That’s it. That’s what I want.”
Her artist, known simply as “T” and clad in designer glasses and tattoo-covered skin, peers over the counter at her. “Are you okay? It looks like you’ve had a couple of cocktails.”
She waves him off with a flip of the wrist and puts her preppy designer purse down so she can sign the consent form.
She turns to her friend. “I might as well do this, right?”
Her cashmere-wearing companion shrugs her shoulders, feigning disinterest. “It’s your skin, your tattoo.”
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It’s a Friday night on South Street and among the bars, restaurants and clothing stores is an anomaly of a block: the tattoo corridor. Packed with six parlors and a handful of piercing and record shops, it spans the length of 4th Street between South and Bainbridge streets. While the tipsy tattoo is a common sight, alcohol is far from the only thing that motivates people to get inked.
“Without a doubt you’re going to see more impulse buys on a Friday or Saturday night, say in comparison to a Tuesday afternoon,” says Matt McGarvey, the self-described “janitor” who acts more like conductor and ringleader of one of South Street’s Philadelphia Eddie’s parlors.
But with tattoos becoming increasingly mainstream, it’s not just sailors and convicts looking to treat their bodies as a canvas. Across the street from Philadelphia Eddie’s, at No Ka Oi Tiki Tattoo, tattoo artist Cindy Solano, a petite Indian woman with a generous share of piercings and ink, explains that businessmen, lawyers and teachers routinely saunter in.
Last week, for example, a 63-year-old-woman came in to get a tattoo on her birthday. It was her first and, from the sound of it, not her last.
Even scanning Penn’s campus, it’s not uncommon to see a tattoo peeking out from under a hem or sleeve. College junior Donielle Johnson is one of many tattooed students that you might not peg at first glance.
Each of her three tattoos — an umbrella, a hummingbird and a pax cultura symbol — captures who she was at a given point in her life, whether artistically or culturally, she explains. “I was really big into the music scene when I was younger,” she says, attributing her interest in getting inked to early exposure to an edgier culture and to an ex-boyfriend with a penchant for tattoos.
Although Johnson got all three of her tattoos in her home state of Virginia, she admits that South Street is the first place that typically comes to Penn students’ minds when they decide to take the plunge. “Everyone looking for a tattoo parlor in Philadelphia just heads to South Street,” she laughs. “You always know you can get something done there.”
But while the section between South and Bainbridge makes for optimal parlor hopping, it hasn’t always been that way.
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