When 19-year-old Annette sat down to receive one of her “pride tattoos,” she experienced a myriad of feelings, at once both a rush of excitement and a flood of nerves. “It’s always scary to put trust like that in someone when it’s going to be on you forever,” she tells Teen Vogue. Receiving her tattoo marked the end of a journey, the last brick in a road walked with the tattoo artist, using an art style she loved, a final design that appeared reminiscent of her personality, and a message that could transcend her now inked skin. Annette’s tattoo, like so many others, heralds the beginning of a new journey — a path she will forge herself, living proudly in her sexuality.
Historically, tattoos have faced a fierce stigma in many communities. When people connect the art of tattooing with the concept of queerness, they might conjure the work of Samuel Steward, who tattooed the Hells Angels and kept track of his sexual encounters, or the reclamation of the pink triangle, a badge once used by Nazis to brand gay people. In recent times, with the emergence of the QTTR tag, queer people can find artists who are also queer, who can take a more lived-in and sensitive approach to working with clients, especially those who may live with body-associated traumas. Pride is on display through the tattoos of young people, each with their own story, just like Annette’s.
Annette’s tattoo is a fine line design of two girls, dancing closely together, faces turned toward one another. Streaks of purple run through, giving it life and spirit. “My queerness has always been a big part of my life and had been something I was proud of,” Annette explains. “The two people in the tattoo being girls expressed my sexuality that didn't need to be explained in words, and their dancing symbolized an intimacy and softness that I hope to find with someone one day.”
“Growing up, I loved tattoos,” Annette says. “I always have and always planned on getting plenty, even if most of my family thought that they were ‘ugly’ and 'a waste of money,’ I liked them and knew what they meant for me.” She was drawn to the notion of having beautiful art stay on her body forever, and doesn’t plan to taint the memory of what earned a place on her skin with future regret. She’s thankful that the LGBTQ+ community has arrived where we are today, to be able to partake in celebrations together, openly and freely, but she suffers no delusions of grandeur. “We have a long way to go to be equals and not be looked down upon by some for being who we are and loving who we love.”
Annette’s words land with brute force, barrelling into the future we’re all wishing for. “I am worthy of being who I am without fear of other people's words or beliefs filtering through my own,” she says. “My love is a powerful thing and I have learned that I should not feel an ounce of shame for whoever may deserve it. I want everyone to be happy with who they are and to be true to themselves, even if that makes other people uneasy. Maybe they have some learning to do too.”
29-year-old Dylan lives in Washington DC and this year is celebrating his fourth Pride month as an out gay man. Growing up as a Black-Filipino kid in a mostly white area, tattoos were stigmatized in his community, so his path to “fitting in” meant pretending he hated them. “I was constantly made to feel like I had to hide many parts of my identity and assimilate and conform,” Dylan tells Teen Vogue. Coming from a Catholic family and attending religious instruction lived in contention with his attempts to navigate his sexuality: “I never felt like myself.”
Once Dylan turned 18 and left for college, he got his first ink and never looked back. Five tattoos later, after coming out to his mom, he felt the thrill of sitting in the chair and lapping up the good pain, as he puts it. He left his session with the image of an alien, similar to the emoji, shaded on his arm. “I felt lost and lonely for many years and the tattoo symbolizes the acceptance of all my differences that make up who I am, especially my queerness, and it celebrates that I’m not like other people,” he says.
Much like Annette, he doesn’t buy into the notion that “you’ll regret it when you’re older,” instead reveling in the version of himself at that specific point in time, captured like a snapshot on his skin. “The tattoo existing is a story in itself,” he says. Dylan knows that tattoos are a beautiful form of expression. “It’s pure art. Some have incredible stories and deep meaning, and others are for aesthetic, but either way, they're f*cking awesome.”
These days, Dylan invests his time in an array of queer media, each one facilitating the healing he’s always deserved. “When I was younger I really had it engrained in my mind that I would never ever say the words ‘I’m gay’ out loud. As long as I did this or that and acted a certain way I could put up with the facade forever,” he says. Dylan always wanted to fit in, but now he delights in his unique self. He is his younger self’s wildest dream.
19-year-old Tanis, from Vancouver, Canada, wears the chemical structure of estrogen on her arm. She had the tattoo done around the time of her two-and-a-half-year anniversary of starting HRT. “It’s a way I show my transfemme pride in a creative way,” she tells Teen Vogue. It’s an icon of her pride, calling it a part of her that is “unchangeable and inerasable.” The permanence of a tattoo seems to echo Tanis’s joy in fully relishing her truth: “I felt anxious to have this done, but I knew I wanted this as a way of saying that I'm my true self now, and nothing can change that no matter what.”
Tanis’s journey hasn’t always been smooth sailing. She’s come close to having her transition stopped or slowed down, but she’s now found a renewed sense of happiness, having rid herself of the things that prevented her from standing in her truth. “I knew I never wanted to go back for years, and [this tattoo] was something I got to truly celebrate that fact,” she says. It’s thanks to meeting a trans friend who has many tattoos that made Tanis realize that “the tattoos of trans people are something beautiful, special, and meaningful in a unique way I adored.”
“In the end, this tattoo represents a new era for myself, free to be myself unapologetically,” Tanis says, after listening to her family’s concerns that the tattoo would be unprofessional and result in misgendering — she got it anyway. Coming up on four years of being a trans woman, Tanis has learned that rooting herself in the strength of who she is will be the best way to rebel against rising transphobia, that nothing can make her surrender. Tanis reflects on what’s next: “I’m going to make the future bright for all of us.”
For 29-year-old Pepper from Austin, Texas, tattoos are a way for them to state their identity as an agender person. Aside from their tattoo of a literal pepper, it’s the black, white, and green squiggly lines in the shape of a square that symbolizes their identity. “These are the colors of the agender flag, minus grey because I wanted to stick to three colors,” Pepper tells Teen Vogue.
Tattoos were stigmatized where Pepper grew up. Their mom hated them and was “big mad” when Pepper got their first ink, but they don’t care about people’s opinions these days. “I’m too old for it now!”
Pepper had been following @tattoo.dude, who is a QTTR, on Instagram for a while and finally had a chance to be tattooed by them via the stick-and-poke technique — meaning no electric machines were used — during the artist’s guest residency in Austin. “It felt unreal getting it done and knowing I was subtly telling the world my identity,” Pepper says. “I also like the symbolism of a chaotic energy being confined to an invisible box, which is how it felt living as a girl while knowing somehow that I’m not a girl.”
“I’ve been reflecting on how my queer identity has grown over the years,” they explain. “I always identified as queer first, but that’s because I didn’t have the words for, ‘I’m Pepper, not a girl or a boy, but simply Pepper.’” With the pepper tattooed on one arm, and squiggles in a square on the other, Pepper has found their truth: “This is my first Pride where I know fully who I am and I’m excited that I can show the world.”
18-year-old Sam is an artist from Stockholm whose tattoo is simple in appearance but holds a wealth of meaning. On his left hand, he sports a double smiley tattoo — two closing parentheses separated by a colon in the middle. The symbol is borrowed from the Thai BL series Bad Buddy, a wholesome and positive romance, in which the main character Pran uses it to gauge his mood. It’s a world that invites imagination and the normalization of queerness, where characters love who they love. “As someone with a very fluctuating identity and sexuality, I don’t feel very comfortable with labels, so I'm not actually out to my friends and family,” Sam tells Teen Vogue, hence their altered self-portrait.
This Pride month is Sam’s first as a legal adult and it’s given his mind the space to be free in his existence as a person beyond labels. “I’m focusing on not constricting myself to labels and allowing myself to feel and experience everything around me and inside me,” he says.
Through his consumption of queer media like Bad Buddy, Sam feels a stirring freedom in witnessing a love like Pat and Pran’s, knowing it was made with people like him in mind. “This type of queer euphoria took over me,” Sam says of getting the smiley tattoo, his fifth so far.
While Sam’s digital artworks detail the galaxy in Pat’s eyes and the proportions of Pran’s waist, his tattoo tells the same story in fewer strokes. To the uninitiated, it’s a smiley, but in a more discreet “IYKYK” fashion, it’s also a physical marker of his queerness. “It was unlike any of my other tattoos where it stung,” he says. “It was like I was flying, a big sense of liberty and pride. The feeling it gave me should be immortalized, which is exactly why I got it.”
Being queer myself, when I think of tattoos, I’m reminded of my dad and his tattoo sleeves. On the right, his post-colonial identity, pop culture icons, and the things he enjoys. On the left, tā moko, a symbol of his indigeneity as a Māori man. I’m reminded of the empty space he’s kept for his next tattoo. A rainbow. I could not fathom why he, of all people, would choose to mark his skin with that. Then he told me: “For my gay son.”
I don’t have any tattoos like my dad. My skin doesn’t yet exhibit my identity by ink. But when I look to the future, I imagine receiving my tā moko. I see designs of interconnected koru, like a silver fern frond in all its spiraling, unfurling beauty, and it tells the story of my family and where we come from. Those markings will pay homage to my takatāpui ancestors, queer people who lived freely before colonization. I imagine walking into the next phase of my life and joining young men like Sam and Dylan in their inked joy, wearing our queerness with pride. Ink has always been a means to tell our stories, and it works as well on the skin as it does on paper.
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