TORONTO — Off come the parkas, out comes the ink.
Now that scarf season is on the wane, pedestrians and restaurant patrons will start to notice what skin artists have known for years: neck tattoos are not that weird.
At Yonge Street Tattoos, a Toronto shop that’s been in business since 1998, “a lot more people have been coming in and asking for them,” says assistant manager Laurie Sibbert. The trend began about five years ago, she says, “when the rappers started doing it.”
Sibbert says most requests for neck tattoos come from men aged 18 to 25.
Few of them get it.
The shop turns away most requests from customers who aren’t already well-inked. “It’s a huge commitment,” Sibbert explains. “You’re pretty much guaranteeing you can’t even work at McDonald’s.”
That’s becoming less true as ink proliferates across the under-40 demographic. Discounting people who have visible tattoos means dismissing a growing percentage of the young labour force.
“I’ll never be a supreme court justice,” says Joseph Perry, 27. Maybe so, but he’s not doing too badly: Perry is the manager at a new downtown location of Dark Horse Espresso Bar, one of Toronto’s more serious coffee joints.
Perry, who has the letters MTL tattooed beneath his ear in honour of Montreal and the words “one love” along with a skateboard scripted across the back of his neck, says these tattoos, among others across his upper body, work in his favour career-wise.
He doesn’t care for a boss that cares more about his skin than about his work ethic.
“I just don’t want to work in that kind of environment,” Perry says.
Even though Sibbert’s shop won’t do major neck ink as a first tattoo, she says more customers are getting bigger, noticeable tattoos elsewhere.
When Sibbert started working at the shop 13 years ago, she says most customers ordered small “flash” work, the generic stock images plastered across a shop’s walls (think shamrocks and Chinese lettering).
These days, it’s all custom.
“Their first tattoo, they’re getting half their arm done,” Sibbert says, adding that it’s a result of tattooing’s slide into the mainstream. Sibbert says a friend recently visited from Montreal and “was shocked by how heavily tattooed Toronto as a whole is.”
At New Tribe Tattooing & Piercing, shop manager Eric Gaudet has noticed the same thing.
“A lot more people are getting full sleeves, full back pieces. It’s great. That’s definitely becoming more accepted,” says Gaudet.
He’s also noticed an increase in customers asking for visible neck and hand tattoos; New Tribe has the same policy to talk customers out of it if they’re otherwise tattoo-free.
Matty Matheson’s neck tattoos are a sort of sideshow to the rest of his work.
The executive chef of Toronto hotspot Parts & Labour recently had the majority of his skull inked with an eagle fighting a snake. Even with his hair grown in, one wing tip still peeks through his hairline.
Then there’s the neck work (roses, lightning bolts, an anchor, a snake), and the words “riff raff” printed across his knuckles. He’ll tell you about the unprintable stuff if you ask him.
Matheson says he never thought about whether tattoos would interfere with his getting a job.
“I knew that I’d always cook. I never knew I’d be in the position I’m in, but I knew I’d always be in a kitchen. We’re outcasts. We’re in a dark room for 12 hours with three other guys.”
While Matheson talks about himself as an accidentally successful outcast, Clay Mullen, 34, considers himself a “regular” person.
The 34-year-old buyer for Midoco, an art supply store, has a wild boar and a diamond on one side of his neck and is getting a red-winged blackbird on the other side soon. He expected his ink to make a larger statement than it did.
“I was surprised by how little reaction I got on the street,” he says.
Scott Ciniello, 39, is a butcher who over the next year is set to apprentice at famous meat shops Marlow & Daughters in Brooklyn and Dario Cecchini in Panzano, Italy. He has his daughter’s name, Katya, inked into his neck.
“Honestly, it’s never been an obstacle for me. I talk to old ladies, my bank manager doesn’t look at me funny,” he says.
And what does Katya, six, think of the tattoo?
“She loves it,” says Ciniello. “She wants to get my name on her neck.”