How Getting Tattooed Became a Friday The 13th Tradition

Friday the 13^th has long had a spooky reputation in the U.S., right up there with black cat crossings and shattered mirrors. But in the world of tattoos, Friday the 13^th has become something like an anticipated holiday when thousands of people get inked.

It started when Oliver Peck, co-owner of Texas tattoo shop Elm Street Tattoo, decided to tattoo the number 13 on as many people as possible, back-to-back, over a 24-hour period on Friday, June 13, 2008. All told, he managed to tattoo 415 people. Tattoo shops across the country followed suit, including New York City’s Daredevil Tattoo, the first to open after New York legalized tattooing in 1997.

I spoke with Michelle Myles, co-owner of Daredevil Tattoo, about how the tattoo industry got involved with Friday the 13^th and what it’s like to celebrate such an ominous day. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Shirin Ali: What do you think connects tattooing with Friday the 13^th?

Michelle Myles: Well, it’s just something that Oliver Peck thought of, and people really like cheap tattoos! Tattoos have always kind of reflected lucky or unlucky talismans. It’s kind of like how people would get Grim Reaper tattoos. I have a Mr. Lucky tattoo on my shoulder that’s a skull with a top hat. He’s got “13, 13, 13” in his hat band, and I got that in the early 1990s, before Friday the 13^th was a thing [for tattoos]. I think people enjoy tempting fate or making fun of it a little bit. Skulls have always been a really popular image, and that type of stuff can be intimidating in some ways, which people like to embrace for tattoos, maybe as a way to laugh at ill fate or unlucky things. It’s a way to maybe not be afraid of them, or just to embrace it and be aligned with it, you know?

I think Friday the 13^th or just “13” tattoos in general have always been the kind of imagery that people have liked for tattooing.

How did Daredevil Tattoo get started in the Friday the 13^th tattoo tradition?

We started doing the Friday the 13^th thing around 2000. Oliver in Texas was the first one who was doing it, and so we had this tattoo artist at our shop who was friends with Oliver. She wanted to do the same thing, and I said sure. I think she tattooed like five or six of her friends, and then the next time it rolled around, a couple more artists in the shop were like, “Oh, we want to do it, too,” and I said sure. Eventually everybody at the shop wanted to do the Friday the 13^th thing.

But then somebody from Fuse network wanted to film at our shop and do a little profile, and it was right before Friday the 13^th, and I said, “Actually, Friday the 13^th is coming up and we have this special that we do.” And so that was why I ended up continuing it at the shop, to have something for Fuse to film. When the next Friday the 13^th came around, people were calling us from all over the country, asking if they could come in. We had people that were flying in from California, and when I was going to the grocery store, people were recognizing me because of the Fuse network thing. At that point it started to get really crazy. We did it for a few years, and after that other shops started to do it. All these years later and now it’s turned into a whole thing, which is kind of crazy.

What are some other popular tattoos that people get on Friday the 13^th?

Whatever we can do really quickly is probably the No. 1 feature of a Friday the 13^th tattoo. Since we were the first ones doing this in New York, and we’ve been doing it for so long, our shop is a very popular destination for Friday the 13^th. We’ve really streamlined the process and we’re very good at accommodating a lot of people. Sometimes we tattoo 100 to 200 people, depending on the designs. The priority is to do something that’s fun, but still allows us to get through the line of people that show up at the shop.

As far as imagery goes, people will get unlucky and lucky things. Some of the unlucky ones are skulls and Grim Reapers and the number 13 or lightning bolts. It’s just anything that’s fun and quirky. We definitely have some customers who have been coming in for the last 20 years and they have a whole collection of these little designs. There’s this one family that would come in all together, it was Mom, Dad, and the kids. For us, it’s sort of like the closest we can get to how tattooing used to be. It used to be when you came in to get tattooed, you’d just come in, pick something off the wall, and that was what you got. It wasn’t this whole production, about people having custom ideas and spending a lot of time drawing stuff up. You just came in, picked something, sat down, you got tattooed, and that was that.

What makes this upcoming Friday the 13^th special compared to previous years?

It’s always fun when it lands in October because then you have a spooky theme to the day. And I always like October because the weather is still nice. I’m always a little worried whenever there’s a Friday the 13^th in January and it’s going to be freezing outside. We try to make it as fun of a day for everybody as possible. Part of that is taking people’s names and giving them a number so they can go walk around the neighborhood and spend money with our neighbors—eating, drinking, getting a coffee, or whatever. We want it to be fun for everybody, because it’s a stressful, long day. It’s definitely grueling.

Plus, tattoos are expensive these days, so I like that people can still come into Daredevil, a world-renowned tattoo shop, and afford to get tattooed here for $40. Even some punk kid like I was when I got my first tattoo can still come in and afford to get tattooed at our shop. We really like it as a way to connect with new people, and also to have fun with our friends and make new friends for the day. I really love that it gives us a chance to get a little taste of what tattooing was like back in the old days, before it became this more gentrified version of itself.