As the proliferation of luxe tattoo publications, highbrow tattoo websites and mainstream reality-TV tattoo shows has demonstrated, the world of tattooing has changed. The stereotype of tattoos marking hard-core bikers, gang members and societal outcasts has eroded, as tattoos have morphed into acceptability in a broad spectrum of the population and almost all environments. Those who are “sporting ink” these days tend to be more educated, culturally sophisticated, affluent and likely to have white-collar and professional jobs.

Forty-five million Americans have at least one tattoo, and one of the fastest-growing segments of the tattooed population is women. Perhaps because there are more women getting tattoos, there are more women doing the tattooing. Miami Ink, a reality-based cable-TV series on The Learning Channel, was so successful in 2006 that it has spun off a successor: LA Ink, which just debuted on the same channel … only this time, four out of five of the tattoo shop’s artists are women, including the shop’s owner, Kat Von D, an “alumna” of Miami Ink; LA Ink drew 2.9 million viewers for its first episode in August. Figures can be hard to come by in the world of tattoos, but anecdotally, fewer than one in 20 tattoo artists is a woman. What impels someone to enter a field so heavily dominated by men? Four artists at different stages in their tattoo careers shared their stories with me.

JOY RUMORE opened her own tattoo parlor in May 2007 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She was the first person in her family to get a tattoo (she now has over 60). “The first one I did myself, when I was 16, with india ink and a needle: a heart on my hip.” Rumore always drew, and she liked to draw on herself. “I wanted drawings on my body since I was young,” she says. She didn’t think about the difference between boys and girls: “I was always ‘one of the guys.’ When I was a kid, I climbed trees, played ‘war,’ got messy in the backyard … my nickname was Tommy.” She studied anthropology in college and took art classes “for fun … I thought I was going to be digging up mummies in Egypt … that was the plan.” But a friend who had a tattoo shop offered to teach her how to tattoo, and she signed on as his apprentice at age 21. By 22 she had her license.

Now 28, Rumore is happy to have her own shop—Twelve 28 Tattoo, named after her birthday—where she gets to make all the decisions. Does being a female tattoo artist have drawbacks? “Sometimes people walk in off the street and say ‘I ain’t trusting no woman with a gun.’ [Tattoo artists use electric devices with multiple needle heads called “guns.”] I’ve had women be rude, too, asking where the artist is. Guys have a tendency to think I can’t tattoo a skull. ‘You’re right,’ I tell them, ‘I specialize only in fluffy pink bunnies.’ It’s funny because my thesis was on the human skull, and I spent time studying them in the medical examiner’s office! But I have a regular following, and I’m friends with a lot of my clients. You end up being a shrink. People like talking to me and telling me their secrets.”

STEPHANIE TAMEZ was a TV graphics artist in San Antonio; she was almost 30 when she got her first tattoo while visiting Lausanne, Switzerland. “It was done by Philip Leu, my friend’s brother. We hung out and went to a tattoo convention in Amsterdam. He put the idea of working as a tattoo artist in my head. Later on he came to visit me—I was then in San Francisco, where I was exposed to amazing tattoos—and said he’d show me the business. Now I am the only girl who works with a crew of boys [at New York Adorned, on New York City’s Lower East Side] … sometimes it’s a benefit because a girl will come in and be shy about showing her body to a guy. But my work isn’t girly; it’s very graphic.

“Tattooing is a career that’s not for everybody,” says Tamez. “It takes a certain personality. As fun as it is, it’s a lot of pressure. There’s a lot of work involved; you have to be disciplined and focused. You must learn how to negotiate artwork, to please your customer without compromising what you know is a good tattoo, and to be able to back your reasons up. You must be a technical person, trying to be a perfectionist. You have to be a people person—to like people up close and personal. You are providing an important moment in time. You have to draw so much; I draw for six to eight hours every Monday and Tuesday, my days off. I have to research, to compose, to organize references. We don’t get many walk-ins because our shop is a high-end shop, and people seek us out. Everyone has their own reputation: I have over 100 people waiting for work.”

Of her long career in tattooing, she says, “It’s been such an interesting ride—it’s like a huge art school, where I’m studying a melting pot of symbolism: Greek mythology, Tibetan art, Americana … and you meet so many interesting people from all walks of life. Tattooing has allowed me to meet other artists and be exposed to so much cool stuff.”

BETTY ROSE is relatively new to the profession: “It all began when I first met Mike [Bellamy, owner of Red Rocket Tattoo in New York City] at a Boston tattoo convention in 2000. I was not yet 18 at the time, but as soon as I was old enough, I began getting tattooed by Mike and continued to collect tattoos from him and other artists who worked for him. I established a positive client-artist relationship and even brought business to his studio. At 19, I moved to Colorado to work at a ski resort, but I was still considering what to do for a career. When I returned to New York during the summer of 2003, I began making regular visits to Mike’s studio in Manhattan, studying him while he tattooed and generally helping out around the shop. After a few months, Mike began to realize how serious I was about apprenticing myself.

“I feel fortunate to be accepted within a studio of all-male artists. While at first it was slightly intimidating to work in a studio filled with so much testosterone, I do possess a degree of insight into the sensitivities of the male animal. Maybe being a woman had its disadvantages at first. Because I was so young when I started, at first I felt people didn’t take my work seriously, but I couldn’t tell whether it was due to my age or my gender. As for clients, some women are more comfortable receiving tattoos—in intimate areas—by a woman artist. Others like the nuances that female tattoo artists offer. I’m still studying art, taking illustration courses at the Fashion Institute of Technology. My mother, who is an excellent painter, teaches me watercolor painting; it is free- flowing and less constrained than tattooing, but, like tattooing, it is delicate and takes patience.”

MICHELLE MYLES was an early convert to tattooing, and, like Rumore, is a shop owner. Myles got her first tattoos in high school in Texas, then more in St. Louis. At Parsons, where she earned a BFA in painting, Myles “tried to make a connection between tattooing and painting, but that didn’t fly in art school.” She started tattooing in 1991—underground, since tattooing was illegal in New York City until 1996—and says, “Once I began tattooing, I started feeling like art school was a waste of time. Tattooing seemed so much more alive than painting … it was exciting.” Myles co-owns Fun City Tattoos (acquired in 2004; it is the oldest pre-existing tattoo shop in New York City) and Daredevil Tattoo (since 1997) with partner Brad Fink. Eleven artists work at the two shops.

“As a woman artist, it gets me a little more attention,” says Myles. “At this point, it’s an asset to be a woman. Some straight women come because they are more comfortable with a woman, and some gay women come because they love to be around women. And I have a large gay male clientele; I tattooed one gay hairdresser, and he brought all his friends!” Myles has no time for painting these days. “It takes many years of tattooing to really learn to express yourself. I love that very little has changed in the last hundred years … I like being connected to this rich American art form. Tattooing taught me how to draw … it’s not like any other medium. Now everything I draw looks like a tattoo.”