Collection: This Body is Mine: The Power, Protest & Poetry of Black Americans' Tattoos

(United Crowns Logo Hand Tattoo)

Tattoos in Black America are not a trend...they are testimony!

Long before needle met skin in American ink parlors, the ancestral drumbeat of body adornment echoed across the African continent. From the ritual scarification of the Dinka to the symbolic body art of the Yoruba, our people have used the skin as canvas and scripture: telling stories of lineage, rites of passage, power, pain, resistance, and beauty. That ancestral call still pulses through us today.

To be tattooed as a Black person in America is to reclaim what was taken, twisted, and traded our image, our bodies, our voices. It is to say: “This body is mine. This story is mine.” When systems have sought to brand us, define us, confine us, our tattoos have become sacred acts of autonomy. Each line, each script, each symbol is a declaration that we are the authors of our own existence.

In Black America, tattoos are more than decoration...they are resistance!

Our skin, so often politicized, criminalized, and commodified, becomes a radical archive of our lives. In a society that has distorted our reflections and buried our histories, we use ink to speak truth. We wear our scars and our stories. We ink our mothers’ names, our sons’ birthdays, the faces of lost ancestors, maps of the Motherland, verses of scripture, and symbols of survival. Every mark is a refusal to be invisible. Every tattoo is an assertion: “I am here. I matter. I am beautiful. I am Black.”

But let’s speak truth: Black tattoo artists have had to fight tooth and nail to carve space in a white, male-dominated industry that often erased them, until they made it impossible to ignore their brilliance. Despite being shut out of mainstream tattoo culture and shop ownership, Black artists have cultivated new styles, pioneered pigment innovations for melanated skin, and turned chairs into confessionals, healing stations, and cultural workshops.

Black-owned tattoo shops are more than places of business: they are sanctuaries. Sanctuaries where grief meets creation, where trauma is transformed into triumph, where pride meets pigment. In these sacred spaces, artistry becomes advocacy. Tattoos become therapy. Clients don’t just leave with ink; they leave with dignity, confidence, healing, and a visual identity that cannot be denied.

(Dr. Tracy P. Washington & Master Tattooist Draya: Black Ink Crew: Chicago Shop)

And let us not forget the new wave of Black women and queer tattoo artists, changing the culture from the inside out: demanding safety, respect, and spiritual alignment with their clients. They are not just tattooing...they are restoring wholeness.

This exhibit is not just about ink: it’s about identity, autonomy, and art as activism.

From the warriors of the Motherland to the tatted Black Kings and Queens on city blocks today, tattoos have been our way of making the invisible, visible. They’re our Griots (an African tribal storyteller & musician) in ink: preserving names, symbols, and stories that weren’t meant to survive. But we survived. And we tattoo our survival on our skin like scripture.

(Dr. Tracy P. Washington & the Black Ink Crew: Chicago Cast)

Black tattoos are not just culture in motion. They are revolution embodied.

Welcome to the inked archive of Black truth!