u/anarkittydreamscape

Whenever I look up jobs for autistic adults, tattoo artists come up a lot.

At first glance, this makes sense. A lot of autistic people are creative and would benefit from choosing their own hours.

I started tattooing for these very reasons. As an autistic person, I've always retreated into drawing and creative hobbies. I find making art an excellent way to recover from day to day life.

I started teaching myself the basics of tattooing in college and started an apprenticeship after I graduated. When I moved back home, I got a job part time as an artist at a local tattoo shop. I have worked in 3 different tattoo shops since.

I was good at my job and was passionate, but there were some aspects that made it impossible for me to continue long term.

1. Close physical contact for hours

- As a tattoo artist, you are physically touching someone for hours at a time. You are close enough to smell sweat and BO. It can get very warm. And a lot of shops keep the temperature on the cold side because people are in such close contact. Even with gloves, touching and being close to skin and bodies was overstimulating massively. You cannot wear long sleeves or sweaters while working on a tattoo, so temperature regulation and physical touch was a massive issue for me.

2. Expectations of Small Talk

- the shops I have worked in have been advertised as "welcoming" and they have an emphasis on client experience. This meant masking to make everyone else feel as comfortable as possible, at my expense. Chatting throughout the entire tattoo broke my focus and made me exhausted and irritable. Trying to explain my autism diagnosis didn't help much as many people don't really know what that means/ how it effects me. It is important for clients to feel heard and comfortable, and that's not really something that comes naturally to me.

3. Social Media Presence

- in order to maintain a client base, you need to be posting and responding to comments daily. If not multiple times a day. If having to manage conversation in person isn't hard enough, add trying to chat to multiple people daily in order to book clients to pay the bills. If you don't respond quickly or friendly enough, there goes a days worth of work. I consistently struggled to get clients in and spend time on social media reaching out to potential new clients.

4. Interpersonal Relationships

- A lot of tattoo artists are very unique people. Many are social outcasts, and I'm sure a lot of them are autistic and just have different strengths that may make them better suited to the career. There are a lot of unspoken rules in the tattoo industry about what terminology to use and how to interact with other artists. I was never able to feel really included or accepted into tattoo artist circles. I have also had to work with some very bad people and I don't want to have to compromise on my morals to fit in.

5. Lack of Scheduling Consistency

- Clients want tattoos spur of the moment. They cancel last minute. Sometimes they no-call, no-show. Sometimes they say they have 3 hours, but really only have 2. And sometimes they need to tap out early. All of this means very inconsistent pay and scheduling. I thought as a tattoo artist, I would be able to have flexibility in hours, but that's not the case. Being a tattoo artist means getting a request from a client for a tattoo the next day and staying up all night drawing it just for them to cancel last minute. Requiring a deposit can fix some of these problems, but it does not get rid of it completely. I was also only able to work part-time realistically, which limited me and my client base immensely.

Being a tattoo artist was my dream for years. I am heavily tattooed and pierced myself and coming to the realization that I am not suited to being a tattoo artist was very hard for me. I feel like a failure. I feel like I've wasted years of my life committing myself to learning a skill that has not served me. I love my tattoos and sometimes tattoo myself (with proper sanitation and equipment, of course), but I struggle to see myself going back into tattooing as a career. I just wanted to share this as a warning to other autistic people thinking about getting into tattooing. I'm sure there are some of us who can thrive in the right tattoo shop, but it won't be the dream job for all of us.

Do you have any similar experiences? What jobs have you found that serve you as an autistic person?