Constellation Tattoo Collective is temporarily, indefinitely closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many of you have been curious about when we will begin booking again. There are many reasons why we have chosen as a studio not to open during Multnomah County’s current phase of re-opening. Although with compromise to our shared values, it is possible for us to follow re-opening guidelines, re-opening under current pandemic conditions makes us uncomfortable for a variety of reasons.
Other artists may disagree, but we believe that getting tattooed & tattooing are particularly high risk activities because it requires contact/touch & close proximity, in an enclosed space, for extended periods of time. Not only does our studio space lack the ventilation of openable windows required of re-opened facilities, but we know that maintaining contact for an extended period of time, even with masks on, is high risk. Recent safety guidelines state that not just medical grade masks be worn, but goggles as well. Because we cannot avoid 6 feet of face-to-face distance for most procedures, and have to maintain this contact for extended periods of time, we cannot practice safe social distancing.
Because different masks provide different levels of protection, we feel obligated to ensure that each client is provided a medical grade mask, with each artist wearing a single-use medical grade mask for each procedure as well. With 5 artists and their clients to accommodate, we would be hoarding resources that medical professionals, frontline & essential workers, incarcerated people, and low-income and houseless people in our community have been in shortage of, including but not limited to: gloves, barriers, and masks. We believe that it is wrong to allocate these resources to ourselves in the interest of capital when these resources could be donated in the interest of public safety instead.
Multnomah county allowed both hair salons & tattoo shops to open at the same time for Phase 1, an action which assumes that the risk of going to a hair salon and going to a tattoo studio pose the same level of risk. According to the physicians cited on the following graphic, that would make getting tattooed a level 7 “moderate-high” risk on a scale of 1-9: the same level of risk as flying on a plane. If a single client getting tattooed is at a level 7 risk, our artists would be required to routinely take level 7 risks. This feels unsafe & unsustainable for our artists, who would also be at higher risk for acquiring a viral load (the “time” part of the “exposure = time + proximity” formula). It would require us to routinely get tested before/after each tattoo we give. It also puts our artists’ home communities at risk and may require artists to quarantine themselves at home, which is also unsustainable in practice because we are a private studio that books all of our appointments in advance.
We strive to make our studio feel safe and accessible to everyone. The standards we have set around client comfort & safety must be compromised to work under pandemic conditions.
One such compromise is that clients cannot bring a friend or assistant to their appointment. This presents an issue for disabled folks who require assistance, and for our clients with trauma that could be activated by entering a private studio space alone with an artist they do not know. Part of creating a safe space is trauma awareness; especially with so much information circulating online lately about assault & harassment in tattoo studios, we want our clients to be able to feel as safe as possible, which often means bringing a friend for support and witness. Having a friend or family member in visible range and/or physical proximity is one way to ensure that our clients feel safe and cared for, with access to familiar emotional support, during what can possibly be a traumatic, triggering, and/or painful experience for many clients.
We recognize the barriers masks present to deaf/hard of hearing folks, and neurodivergent people reliant on facial expressions/reading, who communicate with others by reading expressions during vulnerable moments of pain, etc.* Without the options to have a friend or family member as company, the practice of establishing trust with & being emotionally available (within reasonable boundaries) for our clients is more important than ever. Wearing masks disguises emotions and muffles speech, making this connection more difficult to establish.
New research about COVID-19 comes out all the time, and dispute around the likelihood of asymptotic spreading has made it difficult to determine if a client or artist who feels healthy could in fact spread the virus. Facts remain difficult to verify. Testing is still unreliable, which means that even if we get tested regularly, we could still carry the virus when we think we are safe to work. Not only this, but a vaccine does not exist yet. Although the financial instability we are experiencing is distressing, we care about our immunocompromised coworkers and clients, and will not take the risk of unintentionally spreading the virus.
Our general consensus is that we will return to tattooing once there is an affordable, available vaccine, although this is subject to change. Cases continue to climb. The death toll in Oregon has not been climbing, and some attribute the growing number of cases to increased testing (although the WW article linked on our website suggests otherwise). We would like to see cases dropping, not climbing, and not dropping due to decreased testing. We would like to see the death toll drop, not remain the same. At that point we can reassess our boundaries and the practical application of our values, and re-evaluate new physician & state recommended guidelines & regulations. Even if we compromised our values of cultivating a safer space, and elected to disregard social distancing measures for the sake of capital, we do not feel confident that we could regularly meet these standards due to the limitations of our space, and due to the requirements of our medium.
We have linked to several sources that have informed our decision below. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we act in the interest of ourselves, our loved ones, our clients, and our communities. If you would like to support our artists, please turn on post notifications on Instagram for each of us individually. Some of us continue to take art commissions and sell our artwork to make ends meet during this difficult time. Your support means so much to us.
With love & solidarity, Constellation Tattoo Collective
Marlow, Ollie, Kat, Leila, & A-B
@wolfgore @hournoon @secondhand_powwow @enbyonce @v_a_l_l_e_y
August 7, 2020
The following links are just a small selection of sources that have informed our decision to remain closed.
”Why COVID-19 case counts are so unreliable.” Center for Health Journalism. https://www.centerforhealthjournalism.org/2020/05/05/why-covid-19-case-counts-are-so-unreliable
“Questions about COVID-19 test accuracy raised across the testing spectrum.” NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/questions-about-covid-19-test-accuracy-raised-across-testing-spectrum-n1214981
”Why unreliable tests are flooding the coronavirus conversation.” National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/why-unreliable-tests-are-flooding-the-coronavirus-conversation-cvd/
“Health Equity Considerations and Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups.” Centers for Disease Control And Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html
“The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus.” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/05/us/coronavirus-latinos-african-americans-cdc-data.html
”Here’s what you need to know when it comes to paying for coronavirus treatment.” CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/09/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-coronavirus-treatment-costs.html
“Why hospitals don’t have enough masks? Because coronavirus broke the market.” Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/05/21/why-dont-hospitals-have-enough-masks-because-coronavirus-broke-market
“New York prisoners are sewing masks for hospitals, but most don’t have their own.” Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/05/new-york-prisoners-are-sewing-masks-for-hospitals-but-most-dont-have-their-own/
“Federal inmates to make cloth virus masks for prisoners’ guards.” Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-06/federal-inmates-to-make-cloth-virus-masks-for-prisoners-guards
“Staying safe isn't just about hygiene and distance. It's about time, too.” CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/18/us/coronavirus-time-risk/index.html
”Hygiene Theatre Is a Huge Waste of Time.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hygiene-theater/614599/
excerpt: “Instead, many of these establishments are boasting about their cleaning practices while inviting strangers into unventilated indoor spaces to share one another’s microbial exhalations. This logic is warped. It completely misrepresents the nature of an airborne threat.”
“Informed Consent & Trauma-Aware Tattooing: Practical Guidelines for Artists.” Tamara Santibañez, Disciple Press. http://www.disciplinepress.com/trauma-aware-tattooing
*Some of the many ways to practice informed consent as a tattoo artist are to “smile and use other facial expressions,” and “Be aware of non-verbal cues as well as spoken feedback. Avoiding eye contact, closed body language, and hesitation can be signs that a client is unsure but having a hard time saying so.”- these behaviors could be missed or misinterpreted as general discomfort with having breached physical boundaries under physician guidelines for pandemic safety, versus other variations of trauma-related discomfort.
“Bracing for another spike[…]” Willamette Week. https://www.wweek.com/news/2020/07/10/bracing-for-another-spike-oregon-officials-say-theyve-traced-covid-19-outbreaks-to-a-fraternity-bash-and-a-bachelor-party/
excerpt: “The bottom line is that the disease is spreading more rapidly than expected and that since reopening, Oregonians have not consistently modeled the behavior needed to contain the spread of COVID-19,’ OHA said in a statement.“
“Phase One Re-opening Guidance.” Oregon Health Authority. https://sharedsystems.dhsoha.state.or.us/DHSForms/Served/le2342F.pdf
“Coronavirus vaccine: when will we have one?” BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51665497