“Many friends or couples who met here for the first time visit our temporary studio at Sziget to get matching tattoos, but oftentimes customers just want to get a permanent design on their skin that reminds them of the festival,” says one of Yakuza’s tattoo artists.
This long-established studio has been returning to Sziget since 1993, without any competitors setting up shop on the festival grounds – the management believes that this monopoly is possible to the fact that the working conditions and customers’ needs are so much different here than in an ordinary environment, and many tattoo artists just don’t want to work here with a temporary establishment.
“I don’t think I’m revealing a great secret by declaring that the most popular tattoos include names, monograms, and the logo of Sziget Festival, but sometimes we get quite bizarre requests: once, a guy asked for a discarded can of herrings pictured in the desert on his skin. Then, the same guy wanted a tattoo that portrays a janitor who is pouring water out of a bucket, while a somber Basset Hound gazes at him. That was pretty weird,” says one of the artists.
Moreover, getting a tattoo at a festival could pose some threats for a number of reasons: because of the omnipresent dust and poor hygienic conditions, there’s a higher risk of infection, and those who get drunk usually pay less attention to cleaning the freshly applied tattoo that usually should be treated as an open wound. Therefore, Yakuza’s tattoo artists ask all of their customers to return after a couple of hours, when they change the dressing. Furthermore, they discourage blatantly drunk patrons from going under the needle, to avoid getting any artwork that they may later regret – plus, alcohol is not good for this creative process anyway, since it boosts bleeding that prevents the healing process.
“We don’t ink on people who are overly drunk. We try to talk them out of making a blunder by suggesting an appointment the next day, so that maybe they change their minds in the meantime. Similarly, we try to discourage freshly formed couples from getting each others’ name permanently injected under their skin,” says the owner of Yakuza.
Getting an appointment for a tattoo is different at Sziget than at any of the city’s ink studios: most customers just drop by during the festival, although those who would like to get a more complex tattoo usually ask for an appointment in advance. Needless to say, customers never sign up for large-scale works at Sziget that require multiple appointments to complete.
“Usually, spontaneous customers appear right after the studio opens its doors, but the phenomenon definitely reaches its peak after 6 o’clock, when revelers are fueled by enough alcohol to go under the needle. This is when we really have to keep it together.”
During our visit at Yakuza, we learned that festivalgoers from the Netherlands are the most frequent tattoo patrons during Sziget – and most of these Dutch customers request designs on their rear ends. This trend has been going on for years, although tattooing the upper arm has been rather popular this year, too. Interestingly, Hungarians who get tattoos here usually return a few weeks later in Yakuza’s ordinary parlor in the city to cover up this memento of the festival, so the studio asks everyone to seriously consider getting inked before getting the permanent picture.
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