Today we’d like to introduce you to Ha Soul Cindy Son.
Ha Soul Cindy, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I was born in South Korea and emigrated to the States when I was five. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Garden Grove. I’ve drawn compulsively since before I can remember. In first grade, I drew an amusement park with this… rainbow contraption with kids bouncing on animals covered in springs against these force-field magnets on each side. And another drawing with helicopters over a freeway at the beach with smiling fish. My teacher submitted them to the district art contest, and my two drawings won 1st AND 2nd place. My mom was so proud of me, and I was just happy to get any kind of attention. In second grade, I wanted to grow up to be Eminem, and in third grade I read a book about Van Gogh and I was enthralled by how he cut off his ear and I was like, “This guy is so intense, this guy’s the shit!” and I decided I wanted to grow up to be Van Gogh instead.
I had a neighbor named Danny who was a weekend dad with two kids, and he became a surrogate dad to all of the kids in the neighborhood. He was always smoking Camels, and knowing he had survived lung cancer, my mom once said, “Danny, you have to quit smoking! It’s bad for your health!” and he replied, “I have nothing to live for” and as an eight-year-old, I truly felt that. He had a lot of tattoos. He had a little blown-out stick-and-poke tattoo of Donald Duck’s face on his forearm that he made himself with a needle and a ballpoint pen in juvie. It was the first tattoo I had ever seen, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Danny later passed away after his 2nd bout of lung cancer.
In community college, I studied Illustration and was dating this guy named Garrett, who had tattoos in a fun, loose style which could be described as a proto-“ignorant” style, and I thought it was so wild. He taught me how to make sticks and pokes and had me tattoo him a lot. I became obsessed with making sticks and pokes on myself and my friends but didn’t consider pursuing tattooing seriously at the time.
Years later, I quit school, responded to a Craigslist ad, and ended up cleaning toilets at a tattoo shop in Anaheim. Tattoos became my entire life. That shop fell apart, and I got kicked out with everyone else. Then, my dog Odi and I went on a road trip to Rhode Island and back and did kitchen tattoos all over the place. When I returned to California, I started apprenticing at Signal Hill Tattoo, but being at the shop 10-12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week, for half a year messed with my mental health, so I had to leave. Then, I started apprenticing at East Broadway Tattoo in Long Beach. After just over 2 cumulative years of apprenticing, I started tattooing at Autumn Moon Tattoo in Anaheim. I later found out that Danny had gotten a dragon tattoo at Autumn Moon sometime in the mid-90s. To find out I was still connected to him in that way was really affirming for me. I felt like he would be proud of me for staying true to who I was and keeping on with what I love to do. I worked my ass off at Autumn Moon for three years and decided I wanted a change of scenery. I moved to Joshua Tree and started working at Strata Tattoo Lab. Just around that time, my friends Leann Galvan and Rebecca Cole opened Slowpoke Tattoo in Anaheim and asked me to work with them.
The owner of Strata, Jay’e Jones, is genuinely the best person on the planet, and I have so much love and respect for her as an artist, a businesswoman, and as a human being. She has been tattooing for 20+ years, through male-dominated bullshit environments, and has built such a solid community of badass lady tattoo artists in the hi-desert. She makes it overwhelmingly clear that she has zero tolerance for misogyny, racism, violence, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, and ableism. As a queer immigrant cis-woman of color, to feel seen and safe is special to me, and I feel so proud to be a part of Strata.
I tattoo at Strata for half the month and tattoo at Slowpoke for the other half. Slowpoke fulfills the need for having a space where femme, queer, and trans people can feel safe getting tattooed, especially in a relatively conservative environment like Orange County. People often comment on how at ease they feel in the shop. Countless times at other shops, I’ve witnessed incidents involving a partially exposed person eliciting unwanted attention and people getting harassed or feeling sexualized in a way to which they didn’t consent. Too many times, I’ve seen unkind people ridicule a trans visitor. It’s so important in tattooing that people feel safe and comfortable in their environment. Getting tattooed is an inherently painful and traumatic experience that subjects people to an experience of vulnerability that should not be taken lightly. Tattooing can also be so healing and freeing, so of course it’s important to make the experience as positive as humanly possible to facilitate that healing experience. It’s definitely the responsibility of the artists to provide a space where the person getting tattooed can feel cared for and supported. It’s something that everyone at Slowpoke and Strata prioritizes, and I feel so grateful to be part of such intentional and beautiful communities of respectful and conscientious human beings.
I’ve heard tattooers be called pirates in the sense that they operate a bit outside of the framework of modern modes of economy. It’s such a wonderful privilege to be able to shape new forms of exchange and community and create structures which are built via cooperation and mutual agreement. People sometimes laugh at me for asking if a price estimate works for them, as in, “I’m thinking this piece will be around $250-300. Would that work for you?” I try to make accommodations like this to stress the importance of working together to achieve a common goal and to make sure that “extravagances” like tattoos can be reasonably affordable to everyone (the worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too!). A lot of people can’t really afford therapy but sometimes getting a new tattoo and shooting the shit with your tattoo artist might be the next best thing.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Becoming a tattoo artist was one of the most difficult undertakings of my life. I had to work my butt off for every single day of it. Apprenticing was especially difficult. The hazing I experienced included sexism, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, toxic masculinity, racism, the constant giving of my time and energy, and labor including emotional labor, and I was in a position where I couldn’t speak out against these things for fear of losing my apprenticeship. Someone threw an X-acto knife at me! I feel fortunate to have started apprenticing at a time when a lot of these things were frowned upon. Skully would say, “If I did the things to you that they did to me when I was apprenticing, they’d put me in prison.”
I’ve had so many people tell me I couldn’t or shouldn’t do it. My parents are Korean, and they were against the idea of me tattooing. They’ve understandably had a very negative opinion of body modification due to its historic cultural practices in East Asia. My dad told me they would historically put piercings on enslaved people and tattoo words like “dog” on people’s foreheads as punishment for being up to no good. After five years of me tattooing, they seem to have warmed to the idea of it. I feel grateful to have had the privilege of receiving the support of my friends, family, loved ones, and a lot of wonderful artists throughout the years.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I make tattoos! I specialize in fineline illustrative blackwork. People seek me out for fineline botanical and animal tattoos. Some faces and human figures as well. I don’t know that I ever chose this style for myself, considering I’d started tattooing with the intention of doing a printmaking woodprint-y style, but as I started tattooing more and more, I would naturally gravitate toward using finer needle groupings. I also really enjoy drawing plants. And I think people picked up on that.
I have been told that I am unusually personable for a tattoo artist. I go out of my way to make sure people are comfortable, and I enjoy getting to know everyone I tattoo on a personal level. For me, tattooing isn’t solely a way for me to make a living; it’s also always been a way of building community and offering other beings and consciousnesses a special experience of being seen and perceived. That is what gives me the most satisfaction.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
I quit smoking cigarettes this year after ten years of smoking, and I feel great. The best way to quit smoking is to get embarrassed about coughing uncontrollably in the middle of a tattoo session. Art is cool! Bad art is even better! Making money is all right. Fairies are real. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.
I’ve been a loser my entire life and the only thing that got me anywhere is consistency. You don’t even have to be good at anything; just don’t give up. That’s the secret. Everyone says this, and that’s because it’s true.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @pineneedlestattoo
Image Credits
Jay Trinh – Photo of me
