It’s Friday the 13th, and tattoo shops across the country are gearing up for a long day ahead.
Last Friday the 13th, Ghost in the Machine Tattoo in Boston was buzzing with the sound of tattoo machines and a vibrant atmosphere. A few people showed up right as the doors opened at noon, and their excitement was palpable.
Nearly every time the holiday comes around, Ghost in the Machine joins in a decades-long tradition of hosting an all-day flash event with specially-made tattoo designs at discounted prices. On this day, artists’ flash sheets were on display at the front of the shop, boasting drawings of skulls, pentagrams and other superstitious imagery.
Kendra Long and Patrick Lindsey were first in line to get tattooed by Michelle Dugan. Long and Lindsey are married now, but one of their first dates was getting Friday the 13th tattoos together. It became a tradition; Long has seven Friday the 13th tattoos, and Lindsey has five.
“[Dugan] also did our wedding rings when we got married,” Lindsey said, “and I put a little 13 in there just because of how we kind of started dating by doing this.”
Dugan estimates she’s worked roughly seven Friday the 13th flash days over her 12-year career as a tattoo artist. The spooky, supernatural images that Friday the 13th evokes come naturally to her. She said she often incorporates “weapons, demons, religious iconography, tarot, [and] flowers” in her work. Dugan’s tattoo station in the basement of the shop is decked out with artwork of monsters, mythical creatures and medieval swordsmen.
She expects to be busy on every Friday the 13th — at previous flash days, she worked practically non-stop, churning out small, simple tattoos on a steady stream of customers.
Oliver Peck, the owner of Elm Street Tattoo in Dallas, Texas, is widely credited with popularizing Friday the 13th flash days. In 2008, he set out to break the Guinness World Record for most tattoos done by a single artist in a 24-hour period. He managed to tattoo the number 13 on 415 people, charging just $13 per tattoo. Though his record has since been broken, the idea of tattooing small, superstitious designs stuck, and participating shops say people flock to these events.
“ It’s definitely a thing of collecting,” Dugan said. “It’s also just kind of like a weird fun tradition for people.”
That’s true of Kendra Long, who added an eighth tattoo to her Friday the 13th collection.
“Sometimes, I think we get tattoos to remember a particular event versus getting them because you want a particular tattoo,” she said. “This is more about getting a tattoo for an event.”
Like in Peck’s record-breaking tattoo run, Friday the 13th designs often include the number 13. Popular designs also feature broken mirrors, black cats and tarot card imagery — Dugan has one tattoo available today based on the Three of Swords tarot card, a heart with three daggers puncturing the center. It’s said to represent pain and anguish, so it’s bad luck to pull it in a tarot reading.
Why would someone want something so unlucky on them forever? That’s the whole point, said John Andrews, a professor at Oklahoma State University who teaches a class on tattoo culture, history and symbolism.
“Tatted people are often always associated with deviants or unlucky or degenerates,” he said, “so it’s kind of like that talisman in superstition of warding off bad luck by saying, ‘I’m already cursed, so you go curse somebody else.’”
Friday the 13th may heighten the visibility of superstition in tattooing, but it’s nearly always been a part of the art form, Andrews said. His first tattoo was a superstitious one: As a young adult, he got into a serious car accident, but came out unscathed. He got the logo of the T-shirt he was wearing at the time of the crash tattooed on his chest.
“I thought, ‘Oh, this is my good luck charm,’” Andrews said. “I got it kind of in a superstitious way of like, ‘I’m wearing that T-shirt always. So I’m untouchable, I guess, with that.’”
In the early 1900s, tattooing entered U.S. culture largely through sailors in the Navy, who would dock at ports around the world and bring home a tattoo as a memento of their time serving.
A barn swallow was one such tattoo. The copper and blue songbird exhibits strong site fidelity, often returning to the same nest year after year. If a sailor had a swallow tattooed on them, superstition said they’d always return home safely. Similarly, a number of sailors got tattoos of pigs and roosters on their feet. When ships went down, wooden crates on board holding pigs and roosters would float. By that logic, with tattoos of the animals, a sailor could not drown.
Andrews has a rooster tattooed on his ankle, done by a traditional artist in San Diego who specializes in flash designs popular with sailors of that era.
“I was like, ‘I want a classic sailor rooster,’” Andrews said, “and he was just like, ‘God, you’re the fifth one today.’ People are still getting them. There’s just something timeless about the magic of them.”
Flash was the only way for those sailors in the early 1900s to get tattooed. Shops were filled floor to ceiling with sheets of designs, mostly in the American traditional style, with heavy black lines, simple imagery and bold shading.
Tattoos are more readily available now than they were then. When sailors docked in a new city, they only had a finite amount of time to find an artist and get a tattoo. At this point, the American tattoo industry has largely moved away from flash tattooing and toward custom work, where a potential client works with an artist to create a non-repeatable design just for them. Still, these special flash events have strong appeal for customers and artists alike.
“I get people in and out, they get that shiny new tattoo for a discounted price, and I just roll on to the next one,” Dugan said.
In a way, these events harken back to the way tattooing used to be. Plus, Andrews said, people can’t resist the urge to indulge in such a nostalgic, ephemeral event.
“Friday the 13th kind of is a rebirth of those like very confined, instantaneous moments of like only get it when it’s this time, otherwise you’re not getting it,” he said.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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