in Massachusetts was won


By Susan Orlean

Stephan Lanphear, the man who brought tattoos back to Massachusetts, is rangy and regular-looking, with choppy brown hair and a long, sweet face - the sort of young guy you might sit next to on a bus and not remember later. Naked, he would be easier to keep in mind, because he is intricately marked, wrist to neck to waist to ankle, working his way into what tattoo artists call a full body suit. Lanphear is thirty-six years old. He ran away from home as a teen-ager and got his first tattoo at seventeen, when he was working at Sohozat, a comic-book store in Manhattan. Over the next few years, he got more tattoos; eventually, he learned how to tattoo and knew immediately that he had found his metier. He is a man who loves his job, and often says things like "Tattooing's done all these great things for me!" and "I haven't tattooed anyone in weeks and I'm just going crazy!"

In 1984, Lanphear moved to Martha's Vineyard with his girlfriend, Gretchen Philbrick. He was making a living as a carpenter, but without much enthusiasm. "I wasn't really digging standing outside in the cold weather and the rain," he said not long ago. "I started dreaming of opening my own tattoo business." Gretchen sold her Volvo so that Lanphear could buy a mail-order tattoo kit and set up a little studio. "I never thought to ask myself why there weren't any tattoo shops on the Vineyard," he continued. "My business lasted a few months. I had tattooed some kid who then went into a bar in town, and he showed off his tattoo and mentioned my name, and it got back to the Board of Health."

In no time, Lanphear figured out why there weren't any tattoo shops on Martha's Vineyard: tattooing had been outlawed in Massachusetts since 1962. In spite of repeated campaigns by tattoo artists and aficionados to change the law, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts still deemed tattooing a "crime against the person," punishable by fines or imprisonment or both. More frustrating still, Massachusetts was the only state besides South Carolina and Oklahoma that had outlawed it - making the ban on tattooing possibly the only position the three states had in common.

Lanphear closed his studio and moved to Rochester. He and Gretchen tried to interest the American Civil Liberties Union in his predicament but had no luck. Several years later, Gretchen contacted the A.C.L.U. again, arguing that the right to tattoo was a serious matter. Soon afterward, Lanphear met with Sarah Wunsch, an A.C.L.U. staff attorney, and Harvey Schwartz, a Boston lawyer whose firm handles employment and civil-rights litigation. Schwartz's last case for the A.C.L.U. involved securing parade permits for neo-Nazis.

"I wouldn't say there was a long line of people at the A.C.L.U. waiting to do Stephan's case," Schwartz said recently. "The people at the A.C.L.U. are baby boomers. There was a lot of stomach-turning when we talked about tattoos." Schwartz, who is in his fifties, said he had his tattoo consciousness raised by his son. "A few years ago, I mentioned to him that I had four little alignment dots tattooed on me when I was having radiation treatment, and then he confessed that he had a tattoo, too - a big one, running up his arm. It's horrendous. He's going to feel really bad about it when he's forty-five." Schwartz decided to argue that the freedom to tattoo was a component of free speech. He wasn't encouraged when the case was assigned to Barbara Rouse, a judge whom he considered thoughtful but not an activist on First Amendment issues. "On the other hand," he said, "you never know who might have a rose tattooed on her ankle."

For most of the twentieth century, tattoos had been easy to come by in Massachusetts - especially around Scollay Square, a down-in-the-mouth wholesale district near Boston's West End. According to David Kruh, whose book, "Always Something Doing," documents the history of the area, the neighborhood was home to such popular entertainers as Sally Keith, who could spin her nipple tassels in opposite directions; Eko and Iko, the albino brothers; Zorita the Snake Girl; Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy; and Mademoiselle Airline, the Human Match. Soldiers, sailors, bookies, drifters, and drunks warmly embraced the theatres and retail establishments around Scollay Square - hot-dog shops, penny arcades, burlesque houses, rum bars, and scores of quick-draw tattoo parlors, where for five dollars you could get "Mom" permanently inscribed on your biceps, or the proverbial bird's-eye view of Sydney tattooed over your kidney. In the meantime, the rest of Boston was wilting. By the late fifties, it had a lower bond rating and less taxable property than almost any equivalent city in the country. In 1961, a fire gutted the Old Howard, the largest theatre in Scollay Square, which was considered a stroke of good timing by urban planners, since by then the city wanted to clean up the entire district and build a new government-office complex. The following year, alleging that tattooing could set off a hepatitis outbreak, Massachusetts outlawed it - except for medical purposes, as in Harvey Schwartz's case.

Who really cared that tattooing was outlawed? Tattooscene.com estimates that there were only five hundred tattoo artists working in the whole country then, and their customers were Hell's Angels, circus freaks, performance artists, prisoners, and sailors - all either politically irrelevant or happy to be tattooed by "scratchers" operating without the benefit of legal sanction. For the next decade, tattooing was in a fallow period. Then Asian imagery and new, more vivid colored inks started to renew interest, and by 1982 the enthusiasm for tattooing was such that an industry convention was held on the Queen Mary, in Long Beach, California, and Governor Jerry Brown issued a welcome proclamation. By the early nineties, fashion was celebrating tribalism and transgressive style, and Madonna, Dennis Rodman, and Cher were flaunting their tattoos. In 1997, U.S. News & World Report stated that tattooing was the sixth-fastest-growing retail industry in the country. Its customer base increasingly included middle-class suburban women.

What do you do, then, if you're a tattoo artist living in the anti-tattoo state of Massachusetts while this revival is going on? You pierce, because there are no state restrictions on piercing, and you agitate to change the tattoo laws. One afternoon last winter, I went to Body Xtremes, a piercing salon near Boston owned by a former police officer named Mik Miller. Miller has one of the most amusing tattoos I've ever seen - besides having spiders and symbols all over his face, a ring through his nose, and multiple piercings in his eyebrows, chin, and tongue, he has a face tattooed on the back of his shaved head, so that it's hard to tell if you're standing in front of him or behind him.

Miller found piercing artistically stifling. "Belly buttons! Belly buttons! Belly buttons!" he said. "It's not that I don't like working. I'm fifty-four and I love to work. But I got so sick of belly buttons. Sometimes from nine in the morning until ten at night it was nothing but one belly button after another."

"We do a lot of tongues, too," said his niece, who was working the cash register.

"True," Mik said. "But we still do about four belly buttons for every tongue." The door of the shop opened, and three teen-agers wearing bluejeans and Pumas came in and headed for the jewelry case. "I've been doing this for twenty-six years," Miller said. "In the beginning, you couldn't make a living doing it. But then MTV started showing all these bands with their piercings and their tattoos, and it got huge. It's still growing as a business. It'll never slow down."

Miller, along with Leo and Judy Murphy, who now own piercing and tattoo parlors in Salem, New Hampshire, and Gloucester and Salem, Massachusetts, formed the tattoo vanguard in the state. They had circulated petitions - in 1986 alone, Miller collected a hundred and fifty thousand signatures - and had spoken before the legislature in support of tattooing; they had even met with the Department of Public Health and got an assurance that the department would not oppose legalization. None of them had ever even met Stephan Lanphear; they knew vaguely of the case and assumed that it would be dismissed.

In his brief, filed on February 11, 2000, Harvey Schwartz made the argument that tattooing was a form of free expression, protected by the same constitutional principles that apply to other forms of expressive display, such as parades and nude dancing. He discounted the state's concerns over tattooing's health risks, pointing out that these are minimal, and that piercing, which is unregulated, raises greater risks, as does the practice of collecting blood for laboratory tests. Moreover, Schwartz said, the ban on tattooing was mostly ineffective: enforcement against scratchers was rare; "tattoo parties" were joining Tupperware parties as suburban get-togethers; and the tattoo parlors near the border in New Hampshire reported that most of their customers were Massachusetts residents. Schwartz knew that the legislature was considering a tattoo bill - Mik Miller was scheduled to testify in support of it - and he figured that the bill might well be passed before his case was decided. Lanphear didn't dare to hope for anything.

Then Judge Rouse caught everyone by surprise. On October 20, 2000, she ruled that the state's nearly forty-year prohibition against tattooing was "void as violative of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and article 16 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights." Schwartz was ecstatic. Lanphear was astonished. His first reaction, once Schwartz told him the news, was to declare that he was going to name his first child Harvey. In the meantime, he offered to give Schwartz one of the first legal tattoos in Massachusetts in almost forty years.

There was great excitement in Massachusetts about the return of tattooing. Mik Miller got hundreds of calls and well over five hundred E-mails from supporters the day that the Boston Herald reported Judge Rouse's decision. Less excited were shop owners in New Hampshire. After the ruling, I drove north to the border town of Salem, New Hampshire, where tattoo shops are clustered. Route 28 runs up to Salem from Boston, threading through an array of auto shops, pizza joints, doll hospitals, and liquor outlets in squat concrete storefronts and in trailers up on blocks and even in a few wood-frame decommissioned farmhouses. According to state records, New Hampshire has two hundred and sixty-two licensed tattoo artists working out of ten mobile facilities and sixty-five studios, many of which are clumped together near the Massachusetts state line.

During the summer, most tattoo shops are mobbed, but when it's cold, as it was when I was in Salem, they're in the doldrums - dismal and forlorn, like abandoned carnivals. They were probably even more dismal and forlorn than usual, because the new freedom to tattoo in Massachusetts may put them out of business. Many New Hampshire shops have already opened branches across the border, and many are likely to move south altogether. The afternoon I was in Salem, Masterpiece Tattoo was nearly empty. Tattoos by Benny was shut. At Golden Tattoo, two customers - a buxom woman, who had a blue-rose tattoo on her chest, and her buxom daughter, who had no visible markings - were lounging on a flabby sofa in the reception area, chatting with the tattoo artist on duty. The older woman said that her visit was part business and part pleasure; she was thinking of getting another tattoo, and she also had some knives for sale, which she was hoping the tattoo artist might be interested in. The woman said that her name was Debbie and that she lived an hour south, in a small town near Boston. Her daughter was shy and gazed off until Debbie poked her in the side and said, "Show her your tattoo, honey!" The daughter pulled up her sleeve and revealed a red-and-purple songbird. "Is that gorgeous," Debbie said, "or is that gorgeous?" The tattoo artist grinned and looked proud. I asked Debbie how she had become a Golden Tattoo customer. "My brother came here twenty years ago," Debbie said. "I have five brothers, and this is where all of them got tattooed. I have only one brother who doesn't have any tattoos - he's a bleeder." She said that the ruling in favor of tattoos in Massachusetts wouldn't affect her. "It's like going to the hairdresser," she said. "You go where you like it. I'm not going to start going to someone in Massachusetts now just because. I like it here. I looked into this guy's eyes and I trusted him." She motioned to the tattoo artist, who was running his thumb along the edge of a brass-plated dagger. "And he's sweet, too," she said. "He gives you lollipops and lets you take breaks."

He shrugged, looking embarrassed, and then said that he actually lived in Massachusetts and, much as he liked being part of the Golden Tattoo family, he wouldn't mind a shorter commute.

Tattoo artists looking for work in Massachusetts shouldn't have any trouble these days; shortly after Judge Rouse's ruling, tattoo shops opened all over the state. Overnight, Massachusetts was transformed from a state where it had been illegal to get a tattoo into a state where, because there were no regulations in place, it appeared that, say, a ten-year-old could legally tattoo an eight-year-old. The Massachusetts Attorney General, sensing the beginnings of a body-art catastrophe, requested an emergency stay. The Department of Public Health was given until January 31st to draw up rules and licensing procedures, and the commissioners invited tattoo artists to pitch in. One bitter winter's day, health-department officials and other state bureaucrats met with Lanphear, Miller, and the Murphys in a drab room in downtown Boston. When I arrived, the group was sitting around a conference table and Miller was showing them an ear-piercing gun and twelve-gauge needles manufactured by Pleasurable Piercings, Inc.

"I think we should prohibit tattoos on people under eighteen," Miller was saying. "It seems like in this day and age it's the kids who run the parents, and I don't think we want to get involved in that." As he spoke, the saucer-size rings in his ears jiggled a little, and the bug tattoos on his cheeks moved up and down. Someone in the room mentioned that he had taken the subway to the meeting. Miller peered over his reading glasses and said, "Really? Boy, I sure wouldn't. There are just too many weirdos on the subway for me."

A health-department commissioner asked the tattoo artists something about disposable needles and then said, "We're really going to need you guys to help us with this subregulatory language. We need to do better than we did with tanning salons. Tanning is just a disaster in Massachusetts. Also, we're going to have to address tongue-splitting and cartilage-sculpting, and, let's see, finger and toe and rib removal, and, oh, teeth-filing, too. Actually, all the body-modification practices."

"Ugh," Lanphear said, leaning back in his chair. "I'm very conservative. I'm a traditionalist. I don't really think you want to get into that stuff."

"I'm conservative, too," Leo Murphy said. "I'm very passionate about certain things. I believe in the death penalty for child molesters and cemetery vandals. Judy and I belong to the Chamber of Commerce. We cater to moms. I've tattooed grandmothers. We've pierced a seventy-year-old gentleman's nipples. We really want to see this done right."

"I agree," another health-department official said, tapping her pencil. "I think there have to be limits. I don't think we want to be allowing the implantation of spikes in the head and so forth, do we?" A few people shook their heads. "By the way," the official said, to no one in particular, "can you please explain 'branding' to me?"

After Judy described what branding was - using cattle branding as an example - one of the commissioners said she wondered whether the law allows anyone to do anything to anyone, as long as it is consensual. The room was quiet for a moment. A lawyer cleared his throat and said, "I believe that if someone wants his neighbor to amputate his leg there might be some liability issues involved."

The Department of Public Health's temporary stay expired at the end of January, and tattooing commenced - recommenced, that is - after its hiatus of almost forty years. Some towns are still squeamish about the practice, and are trying to use zoning laws to restrict it: if tattooing could be classified as "adult entertainment," for instance, parlors could be confined to areas set aside for other adult entertainments, like strip joints and porn theatres. Local authorities in Holbrook and Lawrence have moved to prevent tattoo parlors from opening up within five hundred feet of schools and churches. Leo and Judy Murphy have asked the A.C.L.U. to challenge the restrictions that the city of Salem is considering. "Tattooed and pierced individuals have rights in this country too," Leo Murphy wrote in a recent letter to the Boston Globe. "Need we be reminded that people who perform or receive body art are just that, people. God bless America and our Constitutional rights, what's left of them."

On Martha's Vineyard, at least, there was no such resistance. In fact, when I called Stephan Lanphear recently to see how his business was doing, he was too busy to come to the phone. He managed to take a break a few days later to return my call. His tattoo studio is called Compass Rose, and he opened it at the beginning of April. For a few weeks, things were quiet, and then, Lanphear said, business just exploded. "Every single day is booked solid, twelve or fourteen hours a day, seven days a week," he said. "I didn't expect it to happen this way. It has just sort of blown up." He said that so far his customers have been people who live on the Vineyard year-round; as soon as the summer people arrived, business would be brisker, if that was even possible.

"The lawsuit was the defining moment of my life," Lanphear said. "I'll never back down from anything again." He informed me that Harvey Schwartz had accepted his offer of a tattoo but hadn't got it yet. He is still working on Schwartz's request that the tattoo symbolize the First Amendment while also complying with his wife's condition that it be very small and placed in a discreet location, such as between his toes. In the meantime, Lanphear had customers who were as old as seventy-two and as young as the legal tattooing age of eighteen, and said that in the short time he'd been open some of them had already come back to him for their fourth and fifth tattoos. Their tastes run to the traditional. "I'm doing a lot of hearts and daggers and eagles and panthers, that sort of thing," he said. "Nothing real, real challenging. But as long as I'm tattooing I'm happy."

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