The latter isn’t helped by its “street name” – stick and poke – the unfriendly slang term for non-electric tattooing. This process involves inserting ink under the skin using needles and various other handheld tools. There’s no fixed way of doing it – Sage is discreet about his tools, although appears to use something resembling a bamboo stick with a needle fixed at the end. It’s a slightly slower process than electric so the pain is possibly more about endurance? Essentially, though, both involve someone poking your skin with a needle.
Sage, 34, has been non-electric tattooing for just over a decade. Gentle, softly spoken, dressed in loose head to toe black linen like an underground technician, his shtick, for want of a better word, is that he only performs this sort of tattooing. He prefers this term compared to the more onomatopoeic street term: “stick and poke sounds a bit aggressive”.
Like many tattooists, Sage started out wanting to be a “collector of tattoos”, a goal he has effectively achieved (“I think there are a few bare bits of skin under here,” he explains, “somewhere ...”). He studied fine art and moved to London, starting at Inside-Out, a cult tattoo parlour with an outpost in Brighton which is where he works now, in a small room at the back, Tom Waits softly soundtracking the process.
Brighton, of course, is considered the Epcot of “alternative stuff”, so it figures that the country’s leading (not his words) non-electric tattooist should work here, in a green painted cottage-shop-thing in Brighton’s lane, just behind the seafront.
He sees a handful of clients each day and works five days a week. Custom is pretty steady, with some people changing their mind after discovering he doesn’t use an electric needle. Others specifically seek him and his technique. There isn’t a grand waiting list, although he has clients who fly over from Switzerland and Spain and the odd A-list celebrity: “I won’t make a fuss about it, though. I mean, the idea of celebrity tattooists … we’re not exactly curing the dead, are we?”
So what’s the appeal of it, now? “I don’t know, but perhaps it’s because tattooing is now very accessible, so people want something that feels a bit more considered. There’s less of a gamble with electric tattoos – that’s not to say non-electric is more risky as it’s still manual, but that might be how people see it?” Miki Vialetto, publisher of Tattoo Life magazine, thinks a saturation of electric tattooing might explain a gradual rise in more manual techniques: “The technique has become so advanced that now they can tattoo anything on skin” he says, adding non-electric “brings back the real power of tattoos”. Curious, I get Sage to try it out on me. It does seem, as he explains, more personal, and it’s certainly a little more painful, like getting a bunch of BCGs, or being stung by wasps: “There’s something about the pain involved in the transition which people like. It’s quite cathartic.” That’s not to say electric tattooing can’t be a deeply intimate process, though – “there’s still someone pushing the needle” – but the instrument is in itself very ‘manual’.
This might explain why the sorts of tattoos people request seem more personal, more unusual. “I did a building for a guy once. He had grown up there and wanted to remember it. I also had a baker who got me to do a bread pan.”Electric tattooing only started in the 19th century. Non-electric was gradually phased out, and considered a bit “lowly” but still has cultural relevance: in Japan it’s called Irezumi, and Rihanna famously got a Maori hand-poked tattoo when she was in New Zealand a few years ago.
Sage is a fan of graphic designs, naive art and Hieronymus Bosch, all of which tie up in some capacity in his work. As crafted as he is, the results look slightly more hand-made, which is part of the appeal: “It leaves more room for imagination”.
Of course this form of tattooing has some collateral. There’s been a rise in DIY tattoos, with people buying rudimentary kits off the internet and doing it at home. “Or pissed,” says Sage. “I sometimes get asked to ‘fix’ hand-done tattoos. But, like a lot of things, some things just can’t be rectified. But, I’ll always try my “Pain”, says tattooist Adam Sage. “That’s something people fixate on when they ask about this form of tattooing. But I don’t think it’s especially worse than a normal tattoo. It’s just different.”
Tattoo pain is fodder for myths, the idea that people pass out, scream or cry; and it’s certainly one reason people don’t get tattooed. As someone who has two tattoos I can vouch for this being myth – it’s fine really. Odd, uncomfortable but sort of nice in a weird way – anyway, I’m curious to know why non-electric tattooing is: a. predicted to quite suddenly become a “thing”, which it is according to the London Tattoo Convention, like Aeropress coffee or Chris Pratt and; b. considered so painful. Also there’s the question of why Rihanna got so much attention when she got a Maori-style tattoo on her hand, and why Style.com made a fuss over Givenchy model Cat McNeil’s.
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