The Great Smoky Mountain Body Art Expo runs from June 19 – 21, 2026, according to the sign outside. It’s located on the main strip of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, a tourist-trappy town with shops selling fudge and fresh taffy and AI-generated Trump merchandise and stuffed black bears. According to my husband, real black bears sometimes come down from the mountain to eat garbage and terrorize tourists, so the garbage cans here are bearproof brown dumpster-looking things with heavy lids that have to be unlatched. Yesterday we saw a bear grazing while we drove into town and took photos and videos from the comfort of our car. The whole trip has been an attempted escape from the current state of the world, with all its wars and parasitic vegetable diseases and impending recessions and general animosity. Yesterday was June 20. Which means today is the last day of the Body Art Expo.
I’ve been eyeing the place all weekend. The only conventions I’ve been to are literary conventions, which I’d assume are a vastly different setup. There’s something curious about tattoos as a concept—the permanence of them, the fact that the ink sits in the dermis, and the immune system spends your whole life trying fruitlessly to eliminate it. In the past, I’ve thought I wanted a tattoo when it turned out I just wanted a T-shirt. My husband could never get a tattoo, he asserts (while we watch a guy in a tank top struggle to unlatch a garbage can near the Expo sign). He can’t even put stickers on his laptop—something about the way they can’t be removed without leaving behind greebles of stickiness makes the endeavor feel like too much of a commitment. Stressful, he says—like, what if he regrets it? My laptop is covered in stickers. When I enter the convention, he opts not to follow.
Inside the convention center, there’s an escalator leading to a basement and a ticket counter charging an apparent $25 admission fee, but most people are just walking right in. The room they’re walking into looks like a warehouse—gray walls, gray card tables, cement floors, a large speaker blaring Kelly Clarkson. Various booths sell tattoos and tattoo aftercare products and GSMBAE merch. One booth is selling something called a Tattooable Hand for $50—a big, veiny rubber thing that stops at the wrist. An attendee wears a shirt that reads “KNOW YOUR F’KN WORTH.” I consider the apostrophe placement—shouldn’t it be “KNOW YOUR F’’K’N’ WORTH”? Maybe that’s too many apostrophes.
The first guy I approach for an interview is middle-aged, stocky, and has no tattoos. I ask him what he’s doing at a tattoo convention, and he says he’s looking forward to seeing all the different artworks and styles. He might even get a tattoo—one across his bicep that reads “MOM.” The popularity of “MOM” tattoos has always eluded me, but I figure your mom is someone you expect always to love. Significant others are fickle, but Mom is forever. Does he worry about the permanence? He shakes his head. It’s all just skin. His kids have tattoos.
Someone else whose kids have tattoos is thirty-six-year-old artist Roman, a pale, skinny guy with a mullet who’s covered head to toe in ink. His forearms are completely black, and he has colorful tats coming all up his neck and behind his ears and even a bit on his face. Roman and his family (his petite, tatted wife Kylie and their two young children) have their own booth—a table with hundreds of photos of Roman’s intricate black-and-white artwork on various limbs. There’s a face of Jesus suffering on the cross; there’s an indigenous person in a headdress; there’s some kind of wizard (maybe Zeus?) clutching a staff. And that’s just the realism section—the section to its right displays various vibrant scenes from Japanese animated TV shows. A gleaming plaque with shiny rainbow lettering reads “FIRST PLACE: ANIME/COMIC.”
When I ask Roman for an interview, he’s extremely eager. “Journalists love talking to us because we’re so welcoming, girl,” he says. His son is showing off his forearm’s tattoo; I can’t quite make out what it is, but its shape is a shield with bold, pop-art-esque colors—the exact sort of thing I’d have thought looked rad when I was eight. Roman’s kids are homeschooled and have their own temporary tattoo business, he tells me, pointing to a sign displaying the kids’ names in bright, childish handwriting. I ask him what brings him to the GSMBAE, and he says it’s a great place to demonstrate the stuff you learn in the industry. “Do you have any tattoos?” he wants to know. When he smiles, a gem on his tooth sparkles. I tell him not yet but that I’ve been contemplating a small smiley face on my right shoulder in David Foster Wallace’s handwriting. “Let’s get it done today, girl!” he exclaims, but I’m not so sure.
Roman and his family practice clean living. They’re all vegan, and they avoid processed foods. Just a few years ago, Roman tells me, he weighed over three hundred pounds and had cancer, but he’s made an effort to get in shape and clean up his act. “It just wasn’t fair to my family,” he adds with a sigh. Now he’s a motivational speaker with plans to write two bestselling books. “Whether you’re vegan, vegetarian, or carnivore,” he advises, after I tell him I’m in the process of going vegetarian, “the most important thing is to avoid processed foods. And take activated charcoal to draw out parasites.” I tell him I got really sick with a parasite in China during college and that my stomach has never been quite the same since. I’m not sure what it is about Roman that compels such honesty from me, but he has the demeanor of someone who doesn’t judge. “Take ivermectin horse paste,” he says, wagging a finger. Not the human-grade version, he adds—“they” don’t have to disclose what “they” put in that one.
He gives me a sticker whose design is a green cartoon fish wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap and a chained necklace displaying a QR code. “Look me up.”
The public perception of tattoos has seen a rapid shift in recent years. Tattoos were once viewed as a sign of deviancy, of rebellion—a surefire path to lifelong unemployment. In one vivid childhood memory, my father points out a heavily-tatted young man in line ahead of us at Disneyland. The sunlight is hot, heavy—I can feel my skin roasting. “He hates his parents,” my dad mutters with a shake of his head. (The guy also has a blue mohawk, which probably doesn’t assuage my dad’s assumptions.) But tattoos are a lot more commonplace now than they were even fifteen years ago. Around 35% of Americans in 2026 have at least one tattoo, compared to just 22% in 2010. If you sort the data for women aged 18 – 29, that 35% soars to nearly 60%. Even within my own straight-edge PhD English program, many of my fellow students have tattoos. Tattoos have gone from a symbol of rebellion to a symbol of self-expression. What, I wonder, could account for this shift?
One possibility is the conception of tattoos as artwork rather than vandalism. Everywhere I look today seems intent on reinforcing that conception. Even the convention’s title—“The Great Smoky Mountain Body Art Expo”—evokes images of art museums; it just so happens that the art is on skin rather than canvases. And one commonality among those I talk to, from Roman to Amanda, an attendee who claims she has “lots of stupid tattoos with no meaning,” to the CFO of an aftercare company, who brags about each of her fully tatted limbs being done in a different style (a leg has colorful cartoons, an arm is all black-and-white photorealism, etc.), is that people are eager to look at others’ tattoos and show their own the way they would paintings in a gallery. Gone is the sense that tattoos must be some deeply personal reminder—to these people, they’re public displays.
I have a friend who works in New York City as a museum curator and also has several tattoos, so I reached out to her to see whether I was onto something. “I’m not sure I’ve thought too hard about the connection [between tattoos and art galleries] before,” she admits. “I guess you could see tattoos as an extended exhibition on one’s body or whatever, and I guess some people do sort of ‘curate’ the art they get.” Tattoos age much like canvas-artwork, she goes on, so there’s an additional element of “temporality.” Getting a tattoo, much like painting a picture, forever marks that period in one’s life. I ask her whether her desire to get tattoos is related to her interest in art. She says yes. “One of my tattoos is directly pulled from a nineteenth-century painting, and I’m going to get another soon that is a dog from Bosch’s The Temptation of St. Anthony. I think most people who appreciate art are the same sort of people who are willing to pay to have art put on their bodies and are the same people who work in artistic fields.” Is the public perception of tattoos changing? She believes it is. “I would say, from my experience in NYC, about half the people who work in art galleries/museums/archives who are under the age of forty have tattoos. When I interviewed for my job at a nineteenth-century American art gallery, which probably serves some of the most conservative clientele, my tattoos were no problem—both my interviewers had tattoos.” Ultimately, her decision to get tattoos is informed by “aesthetics, commemorating important relationships in my life, and self-expression—a visual expression of my interests.”
Another tattoo-enthusiast friend discusses tattoo artists’ tendency to garner fans the way canvas artists do. “A lot of tattoo people become fond of specific artists and seek out their work. My best friend has eleven tattoos from the same artist; her whole body has been covered by this one woman.” She goes on to compare artists to bartenders and therapists for their conversational potential. “Some people get stuff that is very significant, and they want to talk about that significance while being inked. Tattoo artists are story keepers and symbol makers.”
Talking with friends is one thing, but while interviewing people at the Expo, I’m wary about coming off as a judgy untatted infiltrator whose goal is to gawk. I’m not, I remind myself—I’m doing real academic research—but it’s clear some attendees don’t share my view. They’re often short with me, and while none turn down interviews, their words and their body language sometimes clash.
This defensiveness makes sense. When one has made a permanent alteration to one’s body, the fear of criticism and shunning must be overwhelming. After all, nothing can be done after the fact. Getting criticized for one’s tattoos—told that those tattoos are stupid or ugly or a poor decision—must feel like getting criticized for buying an expensive car; sure you can sell it secondhand, and sure you can undergo the painful tattoo removal process, but money and dignity have already been put on the line. I’m not here to mess with people’s dignity, but I wouldn’t expect them to know that. They’re probably used to getting harassed by people who look like me—blank-skinned, bespectacled, awkward, preppy, with a cold academic interest in them.
But what if my goals were more than coldly “academic”? I came in here for a reason, after all—I pretended it was research, but really, I thought talking to people with hundreds of tattoos whose lives haven’t been ruined would rid me of whatever prejudices are stopping me from getting a tattoo of my own. A few years ago, I made an appointment to get one in Boston, but I cancelled it at the last minute. I just wasn’t ready—didn’t understand the full weight of what I was doing. But I understand it now. Also, think about what a great journalistic narrative it would make: “Reporter Enters Tattoo Convention a Skeptic and Exits with a Tattoo.” I consider the aforementioned smiley face, which I’ve had saved on my phone for years and often look at and imagine on my body. David Foster Wallace used to sign autographs and letters with that smiley face, as if reminding whomever he was addressing to stay happy. And then he killed himself, which is the ultimate permanence—far more permanent than a tattoo. If there’s anything I need a permanent reminder of, it’s the message he imparted on others but couldn’t live up to himself.
So I return to Roman, who is unsurprised to see me. I ask him how long the tattoo will take, and he says five minutes tops. There’s a guy in line before me who plans to get a two-hour-long sleeve who lets me cut in front of him, and I’m so flustered that I don’t even thank him. I’ll realize this later and feel mortified, so if you’re reading this, guy—you know who you are—thank you and sorry for my rudeness.
“You can’t misplace this tattoo,” Roman tells me while I sit in his chair, anticipating. “You can’t lose it in a divorce,” which gives me a sense of the average tattoo artist’s typical clientele. I’ll later tell my husband I’m taking the tattoo in the divorce, and we’ll both laugh. “There was a time when I thought I only wanted one tattoo,” Roman goes on, gathering supplies. “You’ll have a full sleeve in no time.”
His wife Kylie asks me what I was doing in China, and I remember I mentioned the parasite that nearly killed me. Studying abroad, I say—I used to speak fluent Mandarin before I let that part of my brain atrophy into slop. Nowadays, my Chinese is broken and accented, and I always have to search for the right word. “She wants to learn Chinese,” Kylie tells me, pointing to her daughter, who’s seated in a nearby chair, looking bored. The speaking is the easy part because there are no conjugations, I reply, but becoming literate is a whole different beast.
The more I talk with Roman and Kylie, the more fascinating our conversation becomes. “Did you eat Kraft mac and cheese between the years of 1996 and 2002?” he asks me while he preps my shoulder with moisturizer. I tell him probably. Almost certainly yes. “The food dye in it is giving people autism.” (I suppose it’s too late to turn back now.)
“Does it hurt?” I ask and then immediately feel like an idiot. Of course it hurts—it’s a fucking tattoo. And my pain tolerance is low. I’ll probably cry like a baby. When I was a kid, I used to cry from vaccines, and this is like getting a hundred vaccines at once.
“You’re pale like me, girl,” Roman points out while he grabs his tattoo gun. “My guess is you’ve gotten some pretty gnarly sunburns.”
I tell him I have.
“Hurts less than that,” and I’m skeptical, but when he begins tattooing me, I become less skeptical. I don’t cry. The closest feeling to that of getting this tattoo is getting what my peers in the 2000s called an “Indian Burn”—where a friend or enemy twists the skin of your arm in two different directions. Except the surface area for this is smaller, so it actually hurts a lot less than that.
“You’ve got a fuckin’ tattoo, girl,” Roman tells me after about a minute, and I look down at my shoulder to see that he’s correct.
I walk through the Smoky Mountain humidity back to the hotel, feeling an odd sense of calm and impermanence—a sense that our time on this planet is limited anyway, that forever isn’t really forever, that humanity’s conception of forever is only eighty-some years. That the Earth will continue to heat up and babies will continue to be born and people will continue to get tattoos long after my own tattoo and I are both worm food.
When my husband asks me what it’s like having something permanent on my body, I think about the scar on my knee from when I tripped and fell during PE class in the third grade. I think about the scar between the first and second knuckles of my left hand from when my puppy—a puppy who is now nearly fifteen years old—bit me during playtime. If I conceptualize the tattoo as just another scar—one placed there deliberately—it kind of seems like everything is permanent.
But then I consider the world we’re returning to, and the privilege we had to escape it for a few days, and I remember something that first guy told me near the entrance of the convention center, back when I was still inkless and virginal.
“Nothing is permanent,” he said. “Remember that. Nothing is permanent.”
-- Hannah Smart is the author of the novel Meat Puppets, and her short stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, West Branch, The Boston Globe, the Cleveland Review of Books, SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y, and more. Her work has been shortlisted in The Masters Review Chapbook Open, nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and discussed in The New Yorker. She is the founder and editor in chief of experimental journal The Militant Grammarian.
