I think one of the most interesting things happening in queer tattooing in India right now has very little to do with aesthetics of studio spaces or perception of one's legitimacy and a lot to do with pace.

Not style. Not trends. Not whether somebody is using a machine or handpoke. Just pace.

A lot of the queer and gender-diverse artists I’ve been speaking to over the last year seem deeply interested in slowing the experience of tattooing down, almost to the point where the tattoo session itself starts becoming the artwork too. Not in an overly romantic way, obviously. People are still disinfecting surfaces and setting up clip cord covers and struggling with rent and difficult clients and cancellations and Instagram algorithms. But emotionally, something feels different in these spaces.

Shaina, a queer tattoo artist based in Mumbai, told me about a handpoke session where the client asked for the music to be turned off completely because they liked hearing “the sound of the needle” entering and leaving the skin. And I remember laughing a little when I first heard that because it sounded so intense, until I realised how rare it is now to experience that kind of silence with another person, especially around your own body.

In frame: Artist, Shaina Tanna tattooing a client (Mumbai, Maharashtra). @shaitan.inks on Instagram

Most commercial tattoo studios are built around noise. Machines buzzing constantly. Metal trays clinking. Reception phones ringing. Somebody walking in midway through your stencil placement asking about pricing. There’s often this subtle pressure to perform toughness too, like you’re supposed to act less nervous than you actually are.

But many queer artists seem to be building environments where nervousness is allowed to exist openly.  

Abie, a queer handpoke artist who began tattooing during lockdown after buying a DIY kit almost impulsively as a birthday gift to themselves, spoke a lot about connection before tattooing. Eye contact before needles. Conversation before setup. Making sure somebody actually feels calm enough to continue. At one point they said, “Connection comes first,” and honestly I think that sentence explains more about queer tattoo spaces than most academic writing ever could.

In Frame: Tattoo by Artist Abie (Bengaluru, Karnataka). @gra_tattoo on Instagram

Because the tattoo itself is permanent, but the emotional memory around getting it becomes permanent too.

And I think a lot of queer people understand this instinctively because so much of queer life already involves carefully negotiating physical and emotional safety in public. You learn very quickly which rooms allow your body to relax and which rooms make you hold yourself defensively.

That awareness shows up in the tattooing, in their process.

It also changes the relationship artists have with their own bodies. Abie described tattooing as “journaling on my body,” while speaking about body dysmorphia and the slow process of learning to look at themselves more tenderly through tattoos over time. Not because tattoos magically “fixed” anything, but because the marks themselves slowly became intertwined with memory, survival, grief, ornamentation and self-recognition. The way they described it felt less like transformation and more like coexistence.

I kept thinking about that while listening to Shaina describe tattooing a woman in her forties who had come in with her two daughters for their first tattoos. After the daughters finished, the mother quietly asked them to step outside before revealing self-harm scars on her wrist that her children didn’t know about. Together, they designed a butterfly to tattoo over them. Later, when the daughters returned, they simply thought their mother had chosen something beautiful.

What stayed with me was the way Shaina spoke about that tattoo afterwards. Not dramatically. Not like tattooing had erased pain or rewritten somebody’s life entirely. They just said it felt like helping somebody build “a new relationship with that part of their body.” Which honestly feels emotionally truer than most healing narratives online now.

This is telling of the queer experience itself because adornment, or this level of acceptance of oneself doesn't just come from being the one that is holding the needle. As a queer person, I know how much more comfortable I began feeling with myself, and even the world or their perception of me once I had visible tattoos. They are my armour. 

And maybe this is also why so many queer and gender-diverse artists are moving away from traditional studio structures entirely and building smaller private spaces instead. Home studios. Appointment-only rooms. Shared artist apartments. Quiet rented corners in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi.

Not because the work is less serious, but because emotional attentiveness is part of the technical process for them.

A lot of these artists are also self-taught or partially self-taught, having entered tattooing through DIY kits, online communities, Instagram mutuals and informal learning circles rather than traditional apprenticeship structures. Which means many of them bypassed some of the older hierarchies of tattoo culture entirely, although not without difficulty.

Both Shaina and Abie spoke about how common misogyny and dismissiveness toward queer artists still are within the industry, especially toward handpoke tattooing, which is often treated as less rigorous or less legitimate than machine work despite requiring extraordinary patience and control. Shaina also mentioned friends being discouraged from developing personal styles because studios considered them insufficiently “commercial.”

And yet neither of them sounded cynical while speaking about tattooing. If anything, both Conversations felt full of relief. Relief at finding other queer artists. Relief at realising there are now entire ecosystems of self-taught women and gender-diverse tattooers across India building their own ways of working outside older structures. 

It left me feeling relieved and seen, having been a part of this ecosystem, to know that there are more artists in this space, doing this kind of work, building and creating intentionally.

At one point Shaina began speaking about travelling women tattoo artists who historically moved between villages in India, and how handpoking for the first time created this strange feeling that maybe somebody in their ancestry had done this too.

In frame: Tattoo by Shaina (Mumbai, Maharashtra). @shaitan.inks on Instagram

I loved that thought because Indian tattoo culture is so often discussed as though it arrived through contemporary studio culture, when in reality tattooing here has always existed in domestic spaces, ritual spaces, feminised spaces, informal spaces and deeply embodied spaces.

Maybe queer tattoo artists are not inventing an entirely new language right now.

Maybe they are simply returning to older ways of marking each other, except now there are nitrile gloves, ring lights, consent forms, and somebody softly asking whether you’d like the music turned off for a while.