We spoke with tattoo and piercing artists from Underground Art, Inc. and Rose Quartz Body Adornment about LGBTQ-friendly spaces in the scene
Memphis is home to dozens of wide-ranging tattoo and piercing shops, with artists offering everything from American traditional to hyper-realism, pre-drawn flash pieces to fully custom creations, and piercings from nostril to navel. While you can find LGBTQIA+ artists all over town, only some shops are specifically designed to be queer-affirming spaces for both their customers and workers. Two of those shops are Underground Art, Inc. and Rose Quartz Body Adornment.
Opened in 1993, Underground Art, Inc. proudly proclaims all are welcome in their shop, and hate has no place there. When the shop was first opened, it was to get away from the culture that blocked anyone who wasn’t a white, heterosexual cis man, says Peyton Le Bauve. The shop promotes inclusion and supporting the community even outside of tattoos, with free condoms, fentanyl test strips, Narcan, and tampons.
About three years ago, Peyton, of Underground Art, became a tattoo artist almost by chance, having worked in large-scale public sculpture pre-pandemic. During the pandemic, work as a sculptor was less available, so they got a reception desk job at Underground until they eventually started their apprenticeship.
Peyton is confident their experience at Underground Art is a special one, different from what it would have been at any other shop, “At Underground, they’re very compassionate and understanding. There is the business side of it, but at the core of it, the people who work there really want to see you succeed. Because of that, it’s a hard place to quit because they really value the people who work there.”
Coming from a fine arts background, Peyton understands how their perspective shapes whatever art they’re creating, whether sculpture or tattoos.
“I am so happy to be trusted with someone’s body permanently, but thinking about it more with fine art concept, I understand that this is living sculpture,” they said.
Peyton describes themselves openly as a queer tattooer and lists their pronouns at the top of their Instagram bio. They are open and proud about their identity so people looking to be tattooed know Peyton is a safe person to go to.
Peyton said, “I find it really endearing when I get someone from places like West Memphis or Millington or somewhere else on the outskirts of town. You can tell they are not used to being around other queer people. I see you. You’re seen, and we can now have this discussion about your life that you might not be able to have with other people in your life.”
It’s more than just sharing queer identities for Peyton, though. They are dedicated to doing quality work, in part because they serve the queer community, saying, “Queers are already an underserved community. Why would you not want to be the best tattooer that you can be for your community?”
Quintin Crabb has worked at Underground Art for over a decade as a receptionist, apprentice and tattoo artist. They also believe the queer and woman-owned shop is a special place, saying, “People are a lot more comfortable from the get-go. They enter the door with a level of comfort they didn’t expect to experience in a tattoo shop. A lot of people expect a more abrasive environment.”
Quintin has always been an artist and says they practically came out of their mother with a pencil in hand. They can’t imagine another career they’d be better suited to, and they wake up every morning thinking about what they’re going to draw next.
Being an openly queer tattoo artist in an openly queer operated shop brings a certain clientele: “A lot of people come to me because they’re comfortable with someone who carries a queer identity, who feels like a safe person to be around. But also, just the inspiration of queer art draws in all kinds of people. They see it as something new, it’s something different and something not necessarily expected,” they said.
Art shapes Quintin’s perspective in life, and their queer identity influences everything about their art, describing their queer identity as a muse, “It pushes my art in a direction and in a flow that I don’t think I would ever understand as a straight or cis-gender individual.”
To Quintin, being queer makes them the artist they are, as queer experience challenges us to view the world in different ways.
“As queer people, we experience a lot of alternatives in life as compared to a lot of cis gender individuals, so I think that channeling that into a form of art creates something amazing that a lot of people don’t necessarily understand or know how to create, because we’ve experienced things in such a way that opens our eyes,” said Quintin.
Quintin’s artwork explores queer representation through the provocative. Their art questions gender, gender norms, and how people can “transverse the planes of feminine versus masculine within their artwork and tattoos.”
Quintin says the answer to the latter is simple, “Men can get flowers. Women can get sharks and daggers and scary things. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. There’s no one way to get tattooed.”
“Tattooing is just a different way of viewing yourself,” says Quintin, “and self-expression is never wrong.”
As a form of self-expression, Quintin finds tattooing to be inherently queer, “There’s queerness all around us. Whether you’re straight, gay, cis, trans, whatever, queerness is a part of your life. It’s in there and it’s okay to look at it and see it for the beautiful thing that it is, because it’s not bad! It’s not wrong. I think tattooing allows people who are kind of locked into one binary mindset to explore things outside of that binary through their own perspective of themselves.”
Just a few miles away, B Mallery opened Rose Quartz Body Adornment in 2021, and from the start, they wanted to create a space they’d feel comfortable in.
“I got to create my preferred space,” they said. “I haven’t thought twice about someone judging me in two years, and it’s because that’s who’s coming in the door. It’s really nice. It’s a huge privilege,” said B.
They proudly curated a reputation as a queer-owned and operated piercing shop, stating, “We are the pink shop. We’re the gay shop. We’re in the Barbie house.”
When discussing the differences between their shop and others, B says it comes down to the clientele—those they attract as well as those who choose to go elsewhere. B was blunt when sharing that some people are deterred from the shop’s queer aesthetic, “Those kind of people don’t want to come here, and that’s perfectly okay with me. There are plenty of shops for them to go to.”
B and Rose Quartz are proud to be different from most of the rest, though.
“You expect the biker attitude or the black metal playing in the background, all black and blue paint and scary flash everywhere. But it can be warm and welcoming,” they said.
B is dedicated to creating and maintaining a warm and welcoming environment, but it takes more than pink paint and a curated jewelry collection. B sets aside a portion of Rose Quartz’s budget every year for piercer education and pays for their piercers’ licenses.
“We do exposure control classes, first aid classes, health inspector training classes—which is a surprising one. For a long time, our health department didn’t really know about the sterility side of piercings and tattoos, so being able to guide them through that and see them become stricter and stricter as the years go on has been really cool,” said B.
A piercing shop as a queer safe place is revolutionary, and the importance is undeniable.
“A lot of people who we have seen firsthand are coming in as part of their gender self-discovery journey,” B shared.
They continued to express the importance of queer safe spaces, “For a lot of people, their first stop is a piercing, sometimes even before they’ve come out to themselves.” To B, this is a kind of self-discovery or self-actualization through body-modification. People can find themselves in their body-modifications. Discussing piercing popular among trans and nonbinary people (bridges and belly buttons), B says these piercings clearly help self confidence levels. “They come in the next time and they’re glowing a different way—and they never stop coming in. They’re always updating their persona.”
Next time you’re looking for some body adornment, be sure to check out Underground Art, Inc., Rose Quartz Body Adornment, or any of the other artists recommended here!
