In the last few decades, tattoos have become a mainstay in pop culture. As parlors around the world get ready to celebrate Friday the 13th with flashes galore, our Pop-ink package examines how these skin markings have evolved beyond their traditional roots — from fandoms to family. In this reported feature, writer Aamina Inayat Khan explores the infatuation with autograph tattoos and why they are a sign of the times in stan culture.
When Frankie, 19, first met his boyfriend in 2022, he was a friend of a friend who had recognized him from the Internet. Earlier that year, Frankie had tweeted pictures of a tattoo he got — the word “Forever” inside of a heart, hand drawn by Charli XCX. “Are you the ‘Forever’ tattoo guy?” Frankie recalls his now-boyfriend asking. “He saved my picture and took it to a tattoo artist, and they were like, ‘Because somebody else had it, we’re not going to.’ So when we met a few months later, he was like, ‘Crazy story. I really nearly got that.’”
Frankie linked up with Charli XCX at a meet and greet, where she autographed his vinyl and four variations of a tattoo design in the top right corner: the word “Forever,” the title of a song about unconditional love that got Frankie through the pandemic, inside of a heart. “She was like, ‘Yeah, that’s so cute, but like…are you sure? This is gonna be for life,’” Frankie tells Teen Vogue. He didn’t feel particularly strange asking for the tattoo request, especially since the artist told him she gets asked for handwritten tattoos all the time. The way he figured it, he wanted to get a tattoo referencing the song anyway, so it may as well be Charli who designed it.
Getting an artist’s handwriting tattooed on your body may once have been considered extreme, fanatical behavior, but it has become a pretty normal thing now, as both fandom and tattoo culture have become more socially acceptable. There’s a new-age intellect to understanding modern pop culture, and tattoos are much closer to a conversation piece than a sign of rebellion. It seems like daily, a new person is going viral on TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), or Instagram for a new flavor of bragging rights: a custom ink job courtesy of the stars.
Fidan, a 22-year-old fan from Germany, took a four-hour train from Hanover to Amsterdam to attend a Tame Impala show. Before setting off, she had a plan to secure her design and, back in Germany, a tattoo appointment booked for the very next day. The day of the show, she queued for five hours in order to get to the front of the GA pit, carrying with her a sign that said: “Give me a ‘Let It Happen’ tattoo.” She and Kevin Parker made eye contact early during the performance. When he got to sing “Let It Happen,” Parker came down to the audience and wrote the words large across Fidan’s forearm.
“After the song, he told me not to get it tattooed because he had done it in a rush, and he thought it was ugly and too big,” Fidan tells Teen Vogue. “It was actually too big, so I got it smaller, but I told him that I love my tattoo and I will definitely get it. My mom saw it and was like, ‘Okay, you did it, and it looks cool. But no more tattoos.’”
In the early days of online fan communities, stan culture, as we now call it, was a niche, inward, hard-to-explain experience. It was built by people who found themselves on the fringes of mainstream art and media, on the fringes of the IRL world. The privacy and anonymity of the Internet made fanaticism easily understood within the walls of those communities, but deeply obscure to everyone else. The most influential artists at the time were making music for losers and outcasts. You wouldn’t dare wear your merch to school.
However, in the last decade, as everyone has migrated online, stan culture is the mainstream. Engaging in stan culture, critically or otherwise, has the same timbre as engaging in political movements or cultural scenes, or any other ideology du jour. There’s social capital and online popularity to be gained in pushing the limits of acceptability in this particular arena, and the behavior that was once considered extreme in the 2010s is now much more widely accepted to be sincere and sentimental. These tattoo videos get hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views, and the comments are largely full of support and envy.
That envy has fans torn about how protective to be of their tattoos. Unlike an autographed photo, a tattoo can be replicated. In fact, tattoos themselves are replications. Fidan was conflicted when her Tame Impala tattoo video went viral on TikTok because there were comments asking if she could post a high-definition photo for them to take to their tattoo artists. “I thought, ‘I waited five hours for the tattoo, and I'm not going to send it to you.’”
For Gabi, a 24-year-old fan from Brazil who got a handwriting sample from Gracie Abrams, that sense of protectiveness comes from the fact that Abrams’ growing success will change the nature of her fan interactions in tours to come. In that sense, her tattoo (the lyric, “I’m burning alive,” that Gracie wrote on Gabi’s sign at a show) and the story behind it are a time capsule. “One year from now, the interactions that we, as Gracie fans, were able to get on her first tours are going to be impossible,” she says. On the other hand, Daniela, 28, who had run into The 1975’s frontman Matty Healy a week before a tattoo appointment where she was already planning to get the band’s rectangular box symbol, felt no attachment to giving photos of her tattoo away because “what feels more special is that he wrote it for me.” Speaking to Teen Vogue, she says: “I mean, anyone can use it. I don't own it. I would be fine with it because either way, it doesn't take away from my experience.”
Stan culture aside, tattoo culture has also changed quite a lot. Individuality complexes can surely be a plague, but there are plenty of people who reject the idea that they lose their individuality by sharing where they get their clothes, how they cut their hair, or the source material for their tattoos. In April 2021, following the fatal police brutality against Daunte Wright, Phoebe Bridgers offered to write handwritten tattoos for anyone who donated to his family. As a result, the lyrics she posted back in 2021 are now free domain for anyone to use.
Long after the fundraiser had passed, Isabel, 21, found in the thread her favorite Phoebe Bridgers lyric, the part in “Smoke Signals” that goes, “I buried a hatchet. It’s coming up lavender.” For her, it was a “good reminder that in order to allow good things to happen, you have to make peace with the bad things that have happened in your past.”
The fact that celebrity handwritten tattoos are so ordinary now is a big part of why she didn’t care that others might have the same one. How unique can a Phoebe Bridgers tattoo be, she thought, especially after seeing the sheer number of them when she went to Bridgers’ show. “I was like, ‘Oh, I'm not as original as I thought I was.’ This is a big popular thing, and I don't think it's necessarily just her [fans.]”
The proliferation of stan culture on social media has definitely softened our collective view on fan tattoos, but it has also shortened the distance between celebrity and fan. Because we have more access to celebrities than ever before, we want more. When it’s not enough to see them live, we want to meet them. And when it’s not enough to meet them, we want to preserve those meetings. As with gods, it’s as much about earning closeness to the figure as it is a way to impress fellow followers. “It’s always a competition to be the most connected to a celebrity,” Frankie says. “Which I suppose can get weird if you really get into it. I do think a lot of people go, ‘Okay, I’ve met them, but what else can I do? Can I get a tattoo? How can I immortalize this?’”
Of course, celebrities are not gods. Countless artists are thrust into role model duties, which young stars will gracefully attempt to push off their plates. No celebrity will ever live up to their place on pedestals, and when that happens, what happens to those tattoos? “They say some irregular sh*t and get canceled for it and you're a bad person for having the tattoo,” Frankie explains, at once shrugging at the idea and giving it sincere consideration. “Like even now, I can see a world where I fade away from [Charli] and still love the tattoo because it’s about something else for me. It’s a memory of a specific part of myself.”
It’s an interesting and novel tension, one that’s a natural product of the age we’re in. We are more analytical about our relationships with celebrities than ever before, and our access to fame is more abundant than ever. Cynically, it could be argued that we’re not as analytical as we are good at performing self-awareness drag. But optimistically, it’s that very tension that allows diehard fans a chance to consider which parts of their connection to art are about the artist and which are about themselves.
