STUCK ON YOU

Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.

- JACKSON ARN

To get a sense of what an art form is all about, study the refreshments. Book readings: the refrigerated black trays of carrots and chewy-plastic cheeses. Gallery openings: the flutes of warmish bubbles, dispassionately sipped. How you’re supposed to consume food and drink at these events mirrors how you’re supposed to consume the art pensively, daintily, the brain signing off on the senses’ input. The New York Tattoo Convention, held during three days in October, just gives you candy. Beer and coffee sold at the front, tacos and burgers in food trucks outside, but free candy for all—bowls of it, spread across hundreds of tables.

Yes, this was around Halloween. But we are talking about a community where people dress up in permanent ink costumes that could be a butterfly or a tiger or the Joker, or all three. At the convention, I spotted tattoos of the Godfather, Harry Potter, Slim Shady, Saul Goodman, Walter White, Tony Montana, Pennywise, Tupac, Aslan, and the Viggo Mortensen character from “Eastern Promises” (less famous than the rest, but the inkiest role in one of the coolest tattoo movies), plus more divisive I.P. such as Donald J. Trump and Jesus H. Christ.

The venue was the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Duggal Greenhouse, all thirtyfive thousand square feet of it. Hillary and Bernie debated here in 2016. The building used to be a boat-assembly plant, which made the festivities oddly apt, since tattoos have always thrived on water: sailors marked themselves and shipped their skins to every latitude, and most of the world’s historic tattoo capitals (San Francisco, Venice, Yokohama, New York) are port cities where a thousand cultures sloshed. During the convention’s opening ceremony, two bagpipers and a drummer marched past rows of stalls, and for a second I wondered if bagpipes might be a tattoo thing. But no: two of the three organizers happened to be Irish.