“What tribe are you from, Chad?” comedian Carlos Mencia joked in a 2004 performance, summing up a general attitude about the designs. The big muscles and the eyebrow maintenance and the tribal tattoos.”īy the early 2000s, tribal tattoos had become a punchline. Then, Holmes said, “the line between Chelsea gay guy and Jersey Shore guy got super-blurry. “There were legions of people trying to do this and screwing it up,” Zulueta said.ĭave Holmes, an editor-at-large at Esquire and an MTV host from 1998 to 2002, remembers the tattoos as part of the mid-’90s uniform in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, along with the Caesar haircut and a sleeveless T-shirt. Jean Paul Gaultier’s celebrated 1994 Les Tatouages collection featured tribal tattoos, and in “From Dusk Till Dawn,” a 1996 movie, George Clooney wore a huge tribal flame design on his arm and neck. (Nic Antaya/The New York Times)Īs Zulueta’s profile grew - he tattooed Dennis Rodman, Jim Jarmusch and Tommy Lee - his style of tattooing became widespread. In this milieu, a tattoo from Zulueta was a signal of membership in, well, a kind of tribe.Īdvertisement Designs, called flash, in tattoo artist Leo Zulueta’s influential 1991 book, at Spiral Tattoo in Ann Arbor, Mich. The tattoo world at the time was dominated by a largely underground network of bikers, skinheads and body modification enthusiasts - sharp contrast to the broad acceptance that tattoos have in Western culture today. With Hardy’s encouragement, Zulueta went to work trying out his tribal designs, mostly on Los Angeles punks. (Hardy’s name is better known to the general public for the namesake clothing line that licensed his name and art.) Then, in 1980, he did his first tattoo - on his own calf, under the supervision of his mentor, Don Ed Hardy, the legendary tattoo artist. (The word “tattoo” comes from the Polynesian word “tatau.”)Īccording to Lars Krutak, an anthropologist who has studied Indigenous tattooing in about 35 countries, tattoos in those cultures were frequently used to signify tribal identity, as well as to mark rites of passage.Īt first, Zulueta displayed his riffs on a handful of these designs in a San Francisco gallery. Zulueta, who is Filipino American, grew up in Hawaii and developed a passion for collecting old images of Indigenous tattoo designs from Southeast Asia and Polynesia, traditions that are several thousand years old. That is the cultural period Aesthetics Wiki defines as “Y2K,” an era that is in the process of being strip-mined by cool internet people under 30 for outfit ideas, design trends and general vibes.
Just as those seeking tribal tattoos 20 and 30 years ago were drawn to the aesthetics of an exoticized, ancient culture, so too are many of the new, Gen Z tribal fans: specifically, to the years 1997 to 2004, and their curious folkways. “Sometimes there will be a week of nothing but tribal,” said Bast, 30, whose long hair and neo-Deadhead style give him the look of an Online Ceramics model. Others are a new twist on the old patterns, idiosyncratic to individual tattoo artists. Some of them look like they’ve been lifted straight out of Woodstock ’94 (or ’99). On arms, legs and torsos from Los Angeles to London and from Santiago, Chile, to Seoul, South Korea, spiny tribal shapes climb hip bones, cross chests and crawl up necks.
Today, thanks to the alchemy of the long-term trend cycle and the social media algorithm, tribal tattoos are making a return.
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