In terms of cost, single use plastics and disposable supplies are only getting cheaper (healthydebate. Speaking from personal experience, tattooing using as many compostable and eco-friendly tattoo supplies as possible costs me nearly three times more. Producers of eco-friendly materials are starting to emerge onto the market, but between manufacturing, shipping, and getting established in the industry, their products are still far from cheap. Plus, most clients care a lot more about the perceived safety of your practice and the designs themselves rather than the carbon footprint. That’s not to say clients don’t care; many certainly do. However, unless you greenwash your brand identity as an “eco-tattooer” and leverage that to pull in new clients, investing in environmentally conscious supplies is not a profitable endeavor. Especially as a self employed artist or small business owner, we usually need to prioritize curating our artistic brands, in order to build a steady clientele, before we can afford the luxury of reducing the carbon footprint of our practices. As a tattooer, making your practice more environmentally conscious is a moral investment, not a business one.

Second, to address the educational obstacle, tattooers are not actually medical professionals. We have neither the training, nor the means to accurately evaluate the clinical safety of each step within our practices. Instead, we depend on our respective certification or licensing systems to teach us what we need to know. In British Columbia, for example, one third of the government’s Guidelines for Body Modifications document details the expected methods for preparing and executing body modifications such as tattooing, but only a mere three sentences on the proper disposal of all non-sharp waste. 

Considering the care and attention which we are expected to employ throughout the rest of our practices, waste disposal seems like an afterthought in our education. 

Lastly, challenging the safety trends in the culture of our industry risks making both our peers and our clients uncomfortable with our practices. As artists, we’ve come a long way in gaining respect from the public and reputation within our community. Much of that comes from having a reliable, professional, and fundamentally safe tattoo practice which doesn’t position our clients as subjects in our experiments to identify and hover above the bare minimum standards for their health and safety. Plus, most people in this part of the world don’t stop at one tattoo or piercing, and tend to visit several different artists as they collect new work. Clients then observe and compare their artists’ practices, and develop a standard of expectation for what health and safety practices “should” look like. 

For example, here in Vancouver, most studios I’ve visited use drape sheets to fully cover the table where clients sit for their tattoo. The table itself is consistently non-porous, wipeable, and sterilized with a medical grade cleaner before and after every client, whereas drapes sheets are a combination of non-sterile single-use plastic and non-wipeable paper that sometimes even sticks to the sweat and fluids on clients’ skin. Drape sheets are not required in BC’s Body Modification Guidelines, cost money, and can single-handedly occupy a third of my trash can after a tattoo session, so when I started tattooing, I didn’t use them. As clients started to either comment on their absence and I interacted with more artists in their studios, I learned that most folks in Vancouver expect them nevertheless, and so I adopted them into my own practice as well.

Even if the practices that clients come to expect are neither required by law nor prove genuinely effective in preventing adverse medical complications, artists can and will accommodate requests from clients expressing reasonable concerns over cleanliness. Whether you’re after a good tip, a returning client, or the simple yet intangible satisfaction of gaining someone’s trust, artists generally want their clients to feel comfortable with their practices. I certainly do, and since drape sheets are not the hill I plan to die on, I have accommodated for the expectation of their presence. 

The industry is changing, however, and many of us still want to craft a personal practice that is mindful of our environmental impact, even if we don’t yet have the means to be perfectly carbon neutral. So what exactly are our options, and what are artists already doing to navigate this challenge?