Brandon has a big tattoo on their left calf. Based on them, it symbolises three things – “riot weapon, kink medium and a survival tool”. To the unassuming eye, it’s a large bottle of piss. 

Brandon is a gender-fluid illustrator based in London, and their tattoo is an element of a wider trend. Everywhere in the UK, queer persons are picking up stick-and-poke needles and tattoo machines, using them on their friends, then going skilled. The tattoos they’re making are crudely drawn, normally have little-to-no shading or color, and infrequently seek to shock. Dubbed ‘deliberately bad’ by some, these DIY tattoos have a reputation – ignorant style.

To the queer individuals who have them, ignorant-style tattoos are a defiant act against the establishment and an announcement against cisnormative dogma. While tattoos have often been positioned as a life-changing decision and, due to this fact, requiring deeper meanings and allegorical symbols, many trans and non-binary people have already made everlasting changes to their bodies, already feel like outsiders, so what difference is a silly tattoo going to make?

“I can see people falling into the trap of pondering ignorant style is just being shitty at tattooing,” says Delia, the transgender tattoo artist behind Brandon’s piss-bottle body art. “I’ve at all times loved irregularities and mistakes. I realised my life is just a protracted series of mistakes and I’ve needed to determine hold those mistakes with tenderness and make them a component of something, relatively than a feature that’s unwanted.”

Delia tattoos in character as ‘Diny’, a twisted and childlike alter-ego whose fixations include anti-capitalism and dead animals. Her designs are messy, chaotic and commonly explicit – one tattoo depicts a tyrannosaurus rex with an erect penis. One other shows two flies having sex, doggy style. She sees these more controversial designs as a way for queer people to reclaim their outsider status in a world where counterculture has grow to be culture, and tattoos typically are not any longer taboo. “In case you still have the desire to make people feel affronted,” she says, “then you definately’ve got to maneuver into tattoos looking purposefully bad”.

Practicing what she preaches, Delia sports equally explicit work on her own body because the designs she gives her clients. One particular neck tattoo, which depicts a cat holding a knife while urinating and defecating, recently caused offence to a passer-by. “The person was like ‘Why have you ever got a fucking monkey tattooed in your neck?’ and I used to be like ‘It’s not a monkey – it’s a cat. It’s shitting and pissing and it’s going to stab you’”. 

For some people this sort of attention means they’re doing something right. 23-year-old queer sex shop employee Colette, who is roofed in ignorant style tattoos, says stares from cis-het people on the road are “the very best type of compliment”. “I feel that the ignorant style is nearly anarchistic,” they are saying. “It defies the gentrified tattoo style and embodies self-expression beyond what regular tattoo artists can offer.”

Most of Colette’s tattoos are the work of Lewis, a Glasgow-based, non-binary artist whose uncanny style incorporates monsters, scary clowns and reclaimed words and phrases like ‘f*ggot’ or ‘I’m gay as fuck’. Lewis says that queer people often go for the DIY tattoo experience since the mainstream route doesn’t accommodate them. “Plenty of queer artists work from their homes or private studios, which is safer for people to whom rooms filled with straight male artists are a bit daunting. Tattooing may be really painful, so if it’s done in an area where you are feeling comfortable, then it’s a nicer experience.”

Despite this concentrate on accessibility, Delia still points to gender imbalances even inside the queer tattooing scene, characterising it as dominated by trans-masculine people. “Where the fuck are the trans women?” she asks. “We’re on the market tattooing all around the world, but more often than not we’re doing so out of our homes. And it’s for a similar reason we’re excluded from a great deal of other things – people know we’re those almost definitely to cause problems.”

One trans woman who has recently moved into tattooing is performance artist Joni, who shares her combined home and workspace with fellow queer artist Jetsün, having learned her craft from him. Archival trans and anarchist posters and magazines function a key inspiration for Joni’s ‘tranarchistic’ work, and her most-requested design is an emblem that she describes as “a visible portmanteau of the trans and anarchist symbols”. 

For Joni, the transgender experience underscores not only the content of her art but in addition the way in which it’s made, with most of her clients being other trans people. “My studio is my lounge, in my all-trans home, and that bed you’re lying on is kindly shared by the opposite trans artists who live there. All my work, tattooing and otherwise, feels entirely reliant on t4t connection and care.”

Joni traces after which re-traces her designs and not using a machine, which leads to no two tattoos looking the identical, even once they’re based on the identical flash piece. In her view, it’s this system that makes her tattoos ‘ignorant’. “They never look ‘how they need to,’” she explains, “just because the bodies they’re imprinted upon defy expectation and homogeneity.”

Jetsün also sees a link between queer bodies and the uninhibited creativity related to ignorant tattoos. “Queer people are likely to be really in contact with our trauma,” he says. “With tattoos, you’re making a everlasting decision – and I think, whether consciously or not, you’re deciding to embrace your body by being creative with it.”

20-year-old musician Link first began getting DIY tattoos at 15, and for them they’re inextricably linked to their relationship with their body. The way in which they see it, “my body is already taboo, so I’ll as well rejoice with it”. Link’s tattoos include a marijuana leaf, the words ‘piss’ and ‘wasteman’, and the National Rail logo. He says that cis persons are often preoccupied with whether he’ll regret these when he’s older, and compares this to the questions often posed about medical transition. As he plainly puts it: “If I don’t regret getting ‘piss’ on my arm, then I’m not going to regret occurring hormones or getting top surgery.”

These concerns about ignorant style tattoos’ permanence speak to cisnormative anxieties around anything that breaks the mould. But by now, the cycle of respectability has been well-rehearsed – it feels obvious that over time, attitudes will erode. It’s no surprise that queer people sit front-and-centre of this movement, just as we’re at all times driving cultural change. In years to return, contestants on Love Island will probably be ignorantly inked, and it would be queer people they’ll must thank.