Modern and Sanitary (Japan, Tokyo)

In Tokyo, the facade of this tattoo parlor plays the card of assumed contrast: Art Deco typography , promise of cleanliness (“Modern and sanitary”), and saturated urban staging — scooters, ATM, stickers. The message is clear: here, we tattoo without taboos, in a space reconciled with the street.

Tattoos in Japan have never been neutral. Long reserved for the working classes who could not afford ornate clothing, they then became, from the Edo period onwards, a criminal identity marker , closely linked to the world of the yakuza . As a result, for decades, tattoos were banned from public baths and swimming pools , and strongly stigmatized in social life.

Today, a current of artisans and artists is demanding an aesthetic, sometimes even therapeutic, rehabilitation . Codes are changing, as are forms. Here, visual references to 1930s Shanghai Art Deco , often taken up in underground tattoo scenes in Asia , reverse the stigma while paying homage to a transnational graphic memory.