These walls, lined with skateboards, stickers and tattoo designs, have seen some things.
After all, New Tribe Tattoo and Piercings has been around for decades. The second-floor studio, tucked above the Queen Street Warehouse bar, has the esthetic of a mid-20th century diner with checkerboard floors and bright red and blue walls. A 1990s Pepsi vending machine populates the waiting area.
But in its 30-year history, New Tribe has never seen anything like this.
“You’ll do like two or three Blink 182 tattoos when they come through,” said Dave Wildenboer, the owner and operator of New Tribe, “but nothing, nothing, nothing like this.”
He’s talking about the Swifties. The mothers, the daughters, the brothers, the best friends — they’ve all come through the doors of New Tribe, asking for a lyric or album name or reference to one of Taylor Swift’s hundreds of songs. And New Tribe is only one of a whole host of tattoo shops around Toronto that have seen an unprecedented surge in bookings this month.
Some of the swell, certainly, was predictable. Swift’s Eras Tour, playing six sold-out shows at the Rogers Centre, was always expected to march into town with hundreds of thousands of visitors and hundreds of millions in economic impact. It had done so in 49 other cities around the world, from Seattle to São Paulo to Singapore, and Toronto had prepared 15 months for Swift to do the same here.
A hotel boost was a given. Spending at bars and restaurants was guaranteed. But tattoos?
“This is unprecedented,” Wildenboer said. “We didn’t know. We had no idea.”
That sort of shocking patronage has been widespread across Toronto during the Eras Tour. In downtown, spending increased 57 per cent during Swift’s first set of shows compared to the week prior, according to Canadian payment processing firm Moneris, while spending by international visitors more than doubled.
By the time Swift’s tour, and all her fans, pack up and leave for Vancouver, the final stop, Wildenboer projects New Tribe will have done about 100 Swift tattoos. Colibri Tattoo’s four locations did about 160 by the first weekend alone, general manager Teala Ciaravella said, so many she had to send extra supplies to each shop.
It’s even more astounding considering the timing. November is a typically slow month, sandwiched between the summer and the holidays. Arielle Grinberg, an independent artist who runs Studio Flora Tattoos, expected to sit around without many bookings.
Instead, she barely has time for a phone call. She’s already done hundreds of Swift tattoos and is virtually booked solid, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., through the end of January with almost exclusively, as some are calling them, Taytoos.
“I’m getting — I’m not even joking — thousands of messages,” Grinberg said.
A majority of her customers are from the United States. A small number are actually from Toronto. Many of them have been on their way to the concert that day, wearing wigs or sparkly dresses.
“There’s glitter all over my floor that I’m constantly mopping up,” Grinberg said. “It will not go away.”
At New Tribe, the demographic matches the biggest chunk of Swift’s fan base — women in their mid-20s to mid-30s. Lots of friends, lots of sisters, lots of mothers and daughters, Wildenboer said. There have been 30-something women on a girls trip and a woman from the Yukon getting matching tattoos with her dad and brother.
Addy Stirtzinger, a Swiftie since Grade 6, was one of the few who predicted any of this. Now 28, the New Tribe artist watched as Swift upended cities around the globe and brought in fans from all over. So in the summer, she started work on flash sheets for each of Swift’s albums.
She made 59 designs. Some are as simple as Swift’s signature, the one emblazoned on her eponymous debut album in 2006. Others are more elaborate. There are friendship bracelets and the Eiffel Tower (from the “Midnights” album), a brief case and heart made of Christmas lights (from “Lover”), and a teddy bear and UFO (from “The Tortured Poets Department.”)
And no, Stirtzinger said, no one has asked for Taylor Swift’s face. Yet.
Michelle Finlayson got her tattoo — the lyric “living for the hope of it all,” from Swift’s “august” off the “folklore” album — at New Tribe ahead of seeing Swift’s first show on Nov. 14. It’s a souvenir of the concert, a way to mark that time she flew from Moncton, New Brunswick to see Swift with her friend, Jessica.
But to Finlayson and so many more Swifties cramming into tattoo shops this month, it means more than that. Finlayson is 35; she was born in 1989, the same year as Swift. And since the album “1989” came out in 2014, Finlayson has been a diehard fan.
Swift’s songs have put words to her life.
“She has such an amazing way of describing things,” Finlayson said. “They almost make perfect sense when you hear them, but you couldn’t put them into words yourself.”
Like the lyric she got tattooed. Finlayson lost her brother Chris to suicide 18 months ago. “Living for the hope of it all” is a reminder to herself: It will get better. Nothing is permanent.
In some respects, this is what being a Swiftie is about. To many, her songs are more than catchy tunes and radio hits. Taken together, her discography is a soundtrack for life, from age 16 to 34 and counting.
Some, of course, don’t feel that way. Ciaravella, the general manager of Colibri Tattoo, appreciates Swift’s positive influence but doesn’t listen to her songs much. Grinberg likes her music, but “would not spend multiple months of rent on a ticket.”
Wildenboer has an 18-year-old daughter, so his exposure to Swift is less by choice.
“I wouldn’t say I’m a Swiftie. I wouldn’t want to insult Swifties. But I’m definitely a fan,” he said. “I wouldn’t get a tattoo, I’ll put it that way.”
