When Tattoos Meant Freedom

The first time Jacci Gresham ever saw a tattoo, she was eight years old: The man, an off-duty factory worker, came stumbling out of a bar across the street from her house, and a flash of color on his arm caught her eye. It didn’t leave a particularly rosy impression. As far as she was concerned back then, “the people who tattooed were ex-convicts and drug addicts.” Gresham grew up in Flint, Michigan, during the 1960s, studied architecture in college, then moved to Detroit after landing a job in the design department at General Motors. “I was the only woman on the floor other than the secretary,” she recalled. There, while drawing up floor plans for car dealerships, Gresham met Ajit “Ali” Singh, a fellow GM designer and fledgling tattoo artist. He had picked up the skill during his earlier years living in Portsmouth, England, a port city soaked in maritime history and teeming with tattooed sailors. The two bonded over art, a shared love for spicy cuisine, and later, tattoos.   

In 1972, he introduced her to Bill Pogue, an enterprising artist who’d recently started up a tattoo school in Shreveport, Louisiana. “And this guy, he basically just handed me a machine to do a tattoo!” she remembered. “I did a little rose — it wasn’t the best, but little bitties like that, you ain’t gonna make much of a mistake.” The experience piqued her artistic curiosity, but she still wasn’t sold on tattooing. It wasn’t until 1976, when Singh and Gresham were laid off from General Motors, that the two moved to New Orleans to open Aart Accent Tattoo. (The double A made sure their name came first in the phonebook, and their eye-catching “Look Better Naked!” sign didn’t hurt.) There, Gresham picked up a Spaulding & Rogers tattoo machine and, under Singh’s tutelage, began to develop as an artist. She started to appreciate the way tattoos looked on her own skin and how they added to her personal style. “In order for me to learn, I started getting tattoos, and I started liking tattoos a lot better!” Gresham, who had once dreamed of becoming a fashion designer, explained. In leaving Detroit, she escaped both the drudgery of the GM office and the social expectations of how a woman like her was “supposed” to live. For her, tattooing meant freedom. 

Maud Wagner, the first American woman to be recognized as a professional tattoo artist, had spent her career performing in circuses before her death in 1961,  at which point it was still extremely rare to see a heavily tattooed woman anywhere outside that context. When Jacci Gresham opened her shop 15 years later, she was still one of only five known women tattooers in the country. Other men in the business often resented her, and discriminatory lending practices in the 1970s made it hard for her to buy the building that housed her tattoo shop. By the time it was forced to close in 2022, Gresham’s place was the oldest tattoo shop in Louisiana. Gresham has seen tattoos move from the sideshow to the mainstream, then rise and fall in popularity. She’s tattooed bikers, nudists, celebrities, and even her own father, who had always been supportive of her career. She is the first documented Black professional tattoo artist in U.S. history and remains the nation’s longest-practicing Black American tattoo artist. 

“People from the Klan came to me to get tattoos,” she said. She asked why they’d let her, a Black woman, tattoo them. “And the reason [they] said is, ‘Because you really do good work.’ I had biker clubs come in — those guys didn’t have a whole lot of respect for women at all, but they gave me respect ’cause I was putting on a decent product.” Her training in design came in handy while doing linework and blending colors. But it was her innovation of using brown paper when drawing up designs for Black and Brown customers that made tattooing more accessible for an entire underserved population of body art enthusiasts. “People in the South had tattoos, but they were hand-stuck tattoos,” she explained. “They were not done by a machine.” Jacci Gresham broke down that barrier. “The mistakes that people made on me, I didn’t make on other people.” 

When she was 29, Gresham began a tattoo collection of her own and flew to San Francisco to get ink — a phoenix — from iconic artist Ed Hardy, whose colorful, individualistic approach helped revolutionize American tattoo culture during the 1970s and 1980s, well before his name became synonymous with flashy graphic T-shirts. In a tale that will be familiar to tattoo lovers from any era, Gresham’s mother was horrified. “I can remember when I got my second tattoo, and my mother followed me into the bathroom, ’cause I’m trying to hide it,” she recalled. She was making more money tattooing than she ever had at GM, but her mother still disapproved of her unorthodox career choice, which she felt was “beneath” her college-educated daughter. Now her parents are both immortalized in a large portrait on her shoulder — her favorite tattoo. 

When I spoke with Gresham, she was at home on her 40-acre farm, having just returned from discussing an upcoming real estate purchase with her bank. While she is technically retired now, she still keeps a private tattoo studio in her house in Picayune, Mississippi. Later this year, she’ll celebrate her eightieth birthday. And while she still prefers to keep her own tattoos mostly covered, she marvels at the new generation of tattooed women like me, who happily adorn their necks and hands and don’t think twice about how anyone else may feel about it. “They give the art the respect that it deserves,” she told me. In her eyes, good ink is an investment and a mark of self-regard. 

Kim Kelly is a heavily tattooed journalist and author based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.