This week, we’re celebrating the one-year anniversary of Highsnobiety Beauty. For a year now, we’ve platformed stories about everything from Gen Z’s plastic surgery paradigm to perfume’s emotional power. “Beauty” is so much more than an aesthetic standard or the products we use — it’s culture, politics, and personal style. Over the next three days, we’re rolling out a special series that captures beauty’s many faces.
Few tattoos carry as much baggage as those inked on the lower back. Much of this baggage can be traced to the late ’90s and early 2000s, when the lumbar tattoo first rose to prominence. It was an era dominated by dangerously low-slung waistbands and precipitously high-cut shirts, both of which left that sloping swath of flesh between the waist and buttocks exposed, and thus, all the better to adorn. When celebrities whose bodies were objects of public fascination — Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan, and Christina Aguilera — filled this fleshy space with ink, the lower back tattoo, already occupying an erogenous zone, became even more closely linked with sex.
It’s not entirely clear when and how the crass nickname “tramp stamp” originated, but after Saturday Night Live used the term in a 2004 skit riffing on party-girls-turned-middle-aged-mothers sick of their tailbone tattoos, it seemed to stick. Tramp stamps became synonymous with a certain kind of woman: promiscuous, trashy, and, by extension, morally corrupt.
These days, as fashion continues to reinvent Y2K staples like low-rise jeans and tube tops, it’s fitting that lower back tattoos, perfectly suited to torso-baring styles, are also making a comeback. “Tattoo trends go hand-in-hand with fashion trends,” says Kaylr Buchanan, a New York–based artist who specializes in hand-poked tattoos. Since late 2022, Buchanan has been making as many as four tramp stamps a week. Victoria Lagano, an artist at Brooklyn’s Magic Cobra Tattoo Society, has a similar take on the resurgence of lower back tattoos: “It’s totally related to fashion trends and how Y2K is booming right now.”
But today’s lower back tattoos don’t look anything like those of yesteryear. And thanks to a new generation of trendsetters, the tramp stamp is also shedding its misogynist, hyper-sexual connotations.
In the early 2000s, lower back tattoos typically took the form of traditionally feminine imagery: think butterflies and hearts accented with tribal-inspired markings. Both Buchanan and Lagano have noticed a shift away from these motifs. According to the two artists, customers are eschewing the cookie-cutter designs of early aughts tramp stamps in favor of custom art. Back then, the typical tattoo-seeker would walk into a shop and get paired with whichever artist was available. They’d pick from the artist’s “flash,” a selection of pre-drawn designs, and hope for the best. But in the age of social media, it’s easier than ever to find an artist willing to bring a customer’s wildest tattoo fantasies to life. “The entire industry is shifting away from [customers] walking in, picking something off the wall, or picking it out of a book,” says “Big Steve” Pedone, owner of Fun City Tattoo. “People want what they want, even if it’s insane.”
As the aesthetic scope of lower back tattoos expands, so do our attitudes toward them. As with so many things that represent narrow ideals of femininity — like the word “slut” or the tyranny of Barbie — women are reclaiming the tramp stamp and working to recast it as a symbol of liberation. “People I’ve tattooed have been like, ‘I like that [the tramp stamp] is trashy,’” Lagano says. “At this point, it’s almost feminist to wear it however you want. It’s kind of like, ‘Oh, I don’t give a fuck what people think about me.’”
Unlike folks who may have faced judgment for their lower back tattoos two or three decades ago, Millennials and Gen Z’ers see tramp stamps through fresh eyes. Buchanan has noticed clients requesting lower back tattoos as an homage to figures from their childhood, like a family member or celebrity they admire. “[Tramp stamps] were first popularized in the late ’90s and early 2000s, so the people that I’m tattooing were kids around that time,” they say. “It’s sweet to see people come in and be like, ‘My favorite pop star had this’ or ‘My mom had this.’”
There’s another more straightforward factor that might also have a hand in the tramp stamp renaissance: Tattoos, in general, have become increasingly mainstream. Young people today might not realize it, but tattoos of all kinds were once closely linked to crime, rendering them a no-no for anyone hoping to work a corporate job. Buchanan points out that hand and neck tattoos were once considered “job-stoppers.” Now, they’re relatively commonplace.
Tramp stamp, bullseye, back bait — whatever you call lower back tattoos, they’re transcending their raunchy nicknames. In the process, they’re highlighting the ways in which women’s bodies are unfairly judged. “People are always going to find new ways to sexualize women or femme people,” Buchanan says. Anything that highlights a woman’s body, whether a tattoo or piece of clothing, is bound to trigger people who “already have misogynistic ideas or tendencies.” In other words, haters will hate — so wear the belly shirt, and get the tramp stamp. Pedone puts it succinctly: “Stereotypes are stupid.”
