Tattoo's last taboo

Getting inked is common, but above-the-neck art remains controversial

Local musician Holly Brewer, who started getting her face and neck tattoos 14 years ago, says reaction to the art has been mixed. (Evan Richman/Globe Staff)

New Hampshire resident Dotty Jenkins doesn't mind the stares. Her hairless scalp is covered with an intricate, colorful web of tattooed images, including flowers, butterflies, and a striking pair of eyes, literally in the back of her head.

Jenkins started her tattoo collection because she has alopecia universalis, a condition that resulted in the loss of all the hair on her body several years ago. She recently won first prize in a tattoo contest sponsored by Salem's Peabody Essex Museum, in conjunction with "Body Politics," its exhibition on traditional Maori tattooing, or moko.

Just as Jenkins's tattoos are her way of reclaiming pride in her appearance, the Maori of New Zealand have been reclaiming their cultural heritage with their return to traditional face painting. Yet in America, where tattooing has become so commonplace that Angelina Jolie's latest ink grabs almost as much attention as her latest adoption, tattoos above the neck remain a topic of controversy, even among hardcore aficionados.

The parts of the body that are hardest to cover - the face and hands - are effectively "the final frontier" in tattooing, says Dave Kimelberg, a heavily tattooed corporate lawyer in Boston who has an ongoing photography project, INKED Inc., that documents fellow professionals and their hidden tattoos.

"Tattoos have become generally much more mainstream in the last five to 10 years, even in the corporate workplace," says Kimelberg, whose own "sleeve" tattoos stop midway down his forearms. "But 99.9 percent of those people stop at the wrists and the neck."

According to a 2006 report in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, as many as one quarter of all citizens between the ages of 18 and 50 now sport at least one tattoo. But if the mainstream has grown accustomed to such permanent art on the body, tattoos on the face continue to represent confrontation, a frank willingness to challenge accepted social notions.

"Vanity is so ingrained in our culture," says Holly Brewer, one-half of the Boston gypsy-punk band Humanwine. "The idea of having a tattoo, especially on the face, isn't socially accepted as pretty. It's treated as an ugly blemish, like, 'Why the hell would you do that?' "

Brewer has an elaborate design on her chin that extends down to cover her neck. She got the initial tattoo almost 14 years ago, when she was 16, and completed it over several years with visits to apprentice tattoo artists from Vermont to Oregon. Though not actually a moko design, hers looks very similar to the chin tattoos historically favored by Maori women and women of other tribal cultures.

"I've always said it must be beard envy," Brewer jokes.

Reaction to her tattoos, Brewer says, has always been mixed, beginning with her own parents. "My mom said, 'Oh, it looks very feminine, like a permanent necklace.' " Her father, on the other hand, grimaced.

Strangers sometimes accost her, demanding to know why she did it. "If people seem like they really can't handle it," she admits, "I'll say it's henna," a long-lasting dye long used for hair color and body art.

The fact that Brewer got her chin tattoo on the underground, in friends' living rooms and bedrooms, is telling. Justin Brooks, a manager at Pino Bros. Ink in Cambridge, says the shop "has a moral stance against doing them. The only people who should be getting face tattoos are the people within the business, and even then, you'll hardly see it."

In fact, the subject can be a sensitive one in many tattoo parlors across Massachusetts, where a 38-year-old ban on tattooing was reversed in 2001. An employee of the Purple Scorpion in Salem noted that his city has a health regulation that prohibits tattooing of the face. One shop owner near Boston brought up the widely held notion that face tattooing can lead to depression, mentioning Mike Wilson, the "Illustrated Man," a well-known Coney Island sideshow performer who died in 1996 of a mysterious head injury.

In the most obvious way, facial tattooing invites stigmatization even at a time when other forms of tattooing have become unremarkable. When a hip-hop heavyweight like Lil Wayne sports tattoos on his face, it's titillating news. In part, that's because facial tattoos are often associated with prison culture. (One subject in the Maori exhibition at the PEM, clearly defying the traditional spiritual and genealogical symbolism of the moko, has the phrase "Mongrel for Life" tattooed across his face, like a mask.)

"If you're in prison getting tattoos you can't cover, on your neck or your knuckles," says Kimelberg, "to some degree, that's an antisocial statement."

Tattoo artist Todd Close, who recently opened the Inkwell Body Art Studio in Amesbury and served as a judge in the Peabody Essex Museum's contest, says he does see facial tattoos on some of his colleagues in the business. He was particularly impressed with the work done on one acquaintance's snake tattoo, which wrapped around his eye. One recent visitor to his shop had an image of "some kind of horned animal" wrapped around his neck.

"It was bow-tie-ish, in the sense that you couldn't miss it," says Close. "No collar could cover it up."

Still, he says, facial tattoos are not something he has seriously considered offering.

"I did have a girl come in who wanted something on her ears," says Close, who declined to do the work. Instead, he asked her how she felt a prospective employer might feel about that kind of tattoo: "I said, is this going to change your life?"

Close himself has tattoos all over his body, though they're covered on this day by a pair of jeans and a big black hoodie. Plainly visible are the silver-dollar-sized disks stretching his ear piercings and a small ring inserted in one nostril.

But tattoos above the neck - that's where he draws the line.

"My wife would divorce me," he says with a smile.