Before tattoo became my profession, it was my intervention.
In this post’s companion podcast episode, I return to the raw origins of my practice—when ancestral nudges led me from self-harm to self-marking, and tattooing became my lifeline. What began as a survival mechanism evolved into a liberation ritual, one I now understand as both personal and political. This conversation is not just a reflection—it's a remembering. A remembering of the ways that Black bodies have always been archives, and how tattooing, for me and so many others, is an act of reclaiming cultural inheritance in a world that tried to erase it.
This is where our inquiry begins.
In the essay that follows—Tattoo as Inheritance: Remembrance, Repair, and Revolution in a Neo-Colonial World—we deepen that remembering. We explore how tattooing, for diasporic Black communities, can become a form of cultural stewardship, spiritual resistance, and embodied archive. We ask: What does it mean to tattoo through grief? Through silence? Through hunger?
And so, we begin—
with a personal invocation.
A Personal Invocation
After more than 20 years of lived experience in the tattoo industry, I no longer view my work as just creative practice—it’s a sacred unfolding. I stand today as the second most prominent Black female tattoo artist in the United States, the first and only recognized from Washington, D.C., the first to prominently do the do (tattoo) in Japan and a cultural bridge between ancestral body modification traditions and the emerging digital age of tattoo expression.
This is not a career. It’s living history.
And this project—the Cultural Stewardship Playbook—alongside many ethnohistorical tattoo projects to come is my living dissertation.
Through this work, I document tattoo, not as the aesthetically pleasing pop-culture practice we know of today. But instead, we’re on a journey together to explore the evolution of tattoo as identity, legacy, and spirit. I have guided the second generation of Black tattoo artists into intentional and sustainable practice—all while mastering myself.
Because though you can’t see it when you cross the practitioner threshold -
tattooing is more than what we do. It’s who we’re becoming.
More about my loud ass abstract to this work in later days. Be sure to subscribe!
The Abstract, Concisely
My life's work in tattoo, as a dissertation examines the enduring socioeconomic and psychological impacts of colonial disruption on traditional African tattoo practices among diasporic tattoo artists and collectors. While extensive anthropological documentation exists, this research addresses a critical gap: the absence of Black anthropologists centering African and diasporic voices in tattoo scholarship, and the systematic exclusion of Black tattoo practitioners from accessing their own cultural knowledge. Through a decolonial ethnohistorical framework, this study rejects the extractive "study and document" approach that has characterized previous research, instead positioning traditional African tattoo practices as living knowledge systems requiring restoration to their rightful cultural stewards.
The forthcoming unfolding envisioned documents cultural bereavement, identity fragmentation, and economic marginalization while simultaneously creating accessible pathways for knowledge reclamation.
This work identifies and names the phenomenon of "inherited cultural amputation" where colonial prohibitions continue generating both market barriers and psychological distress for contemporary practitioners.
Why We Ink
At Little INKPLAY Shop, tattooing is understood as a revolutionary ritual. It’s a practice rooted in ancestral wisdom and self-definition—a cultural, spiritual, and economic act of reclamation.
We tattoo to remember.
We tattoo to repair.
We tattoo to reimagine our future.
This playbook offers a framework for present + future cultural tattoo workers, community researchers, and legacy-minded artists to practice with purpose.
We don’t just wear or slang ink.
We steward the memory.
🎓 Central Research Inquiry
What does it mean to reclaim ancestral tattoo traditions in a neo-colonial world where cultural amputation, economic injustice, and identity erasure still persist—and how can the act of tattooing serve as a revolutionary practice of remembrance, repair, and resurgence for diasporic Black communities?
I’ve posed this question for over TWENTY years now …
The Phenomenon: Tattoo Hunger & Absence
As documented in the Black Tattoo Anthology (BTA) Interview Transcripts, there is a powerful theme that emerges repeatedly across narratives:
"Ink hunger."
“There’s a piece of us we’ve never met. The tattoo is our invitation to meet them.”
This hunger isn’t aesthetic—it’s ancestral. A longing to reconnect with erased cosmologies, silenced rituals, and sacred symbols.
Across interviews, Black artists and cultural practitioners describe tattooing as a means of becoming whole, of calling home parts of themselves lost to colonial violence, assimilation, and cultural rupture.
Ink hunger is the unspoken grief of diasporic people whose skin forgets the map—until tattooing brings it back.
The Cultural Stewardship Playbook – What’s Inside …
This particular leg of my living dissertation is a guide that bridges ethnographic insight, tattoo philosophy, cultural research, and artist case studies. It honors traditional apprenticeship models while advancing new rituals and frameworks for culturally accountable practice.
This living guidebook unfolds as a cultural and spiritual journey through the layered realities of Black tattoo life—past, present, and speculative future.
It begins by naming tattoo as inheritance, reclaiming inkwork as a sacred technology of identity, remembrance, and resistance. From there, the Playbook moves through:
Ancestral memory and erasure
Barriers to cultural expression and how we rebuild sacred systems
Modern ritual as praxis, from sacred studio care to Afro-futurist branding
Emotional repair, grief work, and tattooing as mental/spiritual wellness
Ethical legacy creation through cultural documentation and community-driven tattoo economies
Each section is shaped with reflections from elders, scholars, and next-gen artists, culminating in a manifesto for cultural stewardship.
This Playbook is not just to be read—
It is to be felt, practiced, and passed on.
Words from the Culture Keepers: BTCC Community Reflections
This Playbook is also a collaborative chorus.
We open this offering with reflections from cultural conversationalists, healers, and artists who graciously gave us their time in advance or gathered at the inaugural Black Tattoo Culture Con (BTCC). These voices are living repositories of memory, method, and movement. Their words punctuate this project with wisdom and lived truth.
I didn’t create this history.
And it is unfair to only tell it from my vantage point.
I am a part of it, witness to it, and one of the many cultural bearers of it.
A Call to Cultural Stewards
You are more than a tattoo artist.
You are more than a client.
You are a keeper of story, a spiritual bridge, a cultural architect.
This Playbook is for you—
To read.
To remember.
To reclaim.
Join The Waitlist! | Black Tattoo Culture Con 2025 Returns To DC on Oct 24-26
Download 7 Offbeat Truths: Tattoo & Branding as Cultural Remembrance
Get my book Shoppe Gal, The Memoir and dive more into my journey
Let your body speak the language colonizers tried to silence.
Let your art become the ink your ancestors dreamed in.
Let your stewardship ripple across generations.
INKplay is prayer. Tattoo is testimony. And culture is worth keeping.
Til next time, Creative Cousins!
- Imani K Brown
