How Friday 13th became the tattoo world’s Black Friday

On Friday the 13th, I wandered the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, searching for a tattoo shop. My destination was Cherry Bomb Studio, a tattoo parlour whose doors would remain open unusually late into the night. Cherry Bomb was celebrating Friday the 13th with one of the tattoo world’s biggest traditions: an all-day marathon of affordable work for anyone with a few extra dollars, time to wait in line, and the boldness to permanently memorialise our unluckiest date. 

Now in its 40th year, the tradition comes with a few rules: you can’t make an appointment (walk-ins only), and you can’t request custom designs. The special price was originally a symbolic $13 (plus a seven-dollar tip), but that rate has gone slightly up at many parlours due to inflation, another US tradition. “Tattoos have become the American symbol for a day that is otherwise associated with bad omens,” said USA Today. I was trying to find out why. 

Cherry Bomb already had a line of clients spilling out onto Edlridge Street when I arrived. As much a social event as it is a sale (Cherry Bomb brought in a cotton candy machine for the occasion), I snaked my way inside, nudging through excited customers idling by a Tarot card reader, flicking cigarettes smudged with black lipstick. Inside, I struck up a conversation with Cole, 27, from across the river. Cole was getting a tattoo of a pigeon. “I think they’re an unappreciated bird,” was his reasoning. 

Cherry Bomb, like most shops that night, had designed a special flash sheet. Artwork often features the numeral “13”, alongside other symbols of bad luck, such as black cats and ladders. Other times, however, the 13th is just an opportunity for artists to offer work that on a typical day doesn’t see much love. As Cole said of the bird now immortalised on his body, pigeons “get a lot of hate, but they’re interesting.”

The Friday 13th tradition dates back to 1995. Back then, body art was by no means rare, but was still a far cry from today’s landscape, where nearly 40 per cent of Americans under the age of 30 have tattoos. In America’s Tipper Gore era, tattoo shops in New York were, incredibly, still illegal. Deep in the heart of Texas, this outsider status fostered community among artists and clients, including Oliver Peck, an artist from Dallas. 

“I definitely wasn’t the first person to do it, the number 13 tattoo on Friday the 13th,” Peck told Vice in 2017. “But I definitely made it an event.” Peck, who is self-taught, enjoyed tattooing himself and his friends. But in 1995, he brought in outsiders, holding a 24-hour party during which he tattooed the “13” on a record-setting number of guests. “He ended up tattooing 415 people,” reported Texas’s Houston Chronicle, “and Friday the 13th became associated with getting tattoos.” The event spread over the next decade, receiving national attention in 2008 when it was profiled by Fuse.

At Cherry Bomb, some 30 years later, I approached Ro Batalle, the studio’s owner. In between coordinating artists and managing a growing crowd of walk-ins, Batalle explains how the fast-paced demands of the night influence the artwork. “The strategy changes,” they say. “You don’t want to have perfect circles, for example, because we’re going for speed here, and you want to have a lot of breaks, so you can have a rest of the needle.” Sammi, a Puerto Rico-born artist at Magic Cobra Tattoo Society in Brooklyn, who let me watch her work, had a similar strategy. “The more expedited approach that works for me is to offer black and grey designs only,” she says. 

The need for speed is necessitated by the large crowds the day draws in. Artist Adam Korothy, from New York’s Live by the Sword Tattoo, estimates he once did “about 80” tattoos in one 24-hour period for Friday the 13th. (Ivan Velodares, an artist from Rockaway, Queens, even called the 13th the “Black Friday for tattoos.”) Batalle says it’s “hard” doing so many clients in one night, “but then there’s something to getting back to basics and just doing repeat designs over and over.” Veterans tattooed from head to toe use the occasion to “fill in” remaining uncovered spots, while the value and novelty of the celebration gives nervous neophytes the push they need to walk through the door. “Sometimes September or February is a slow month and if you get a Friday the 13th in there, it's a little boost,” said Korothy.

The date’s biggest appeal among the artists I spoke with, though, was the sense of excitement it brings their clients. “You get collectors,” says Korothy. “They’ll hit four spots in a day, and I think that’s awesome. It's like a fun day for them to go and collect these inexpensive things.” If collecting multiple random tattoos sounds impulsive, perhaps that’s the point. Friday the 13th, after all, is a day that at its core is about unpredictability. As Hannah Grant, another artist working through the night, told me: “It’s fun to do something spontaneous.” Kelsey, a client at Magic Cobra, says, “I think collectively participating in something as an appreciation for the art is really cool.”

So why is Friday the 13th such a natural fit for the world of tattoos? The answer, at least in part, may lie in tattoos’ long relationship with fate and fortune. In Thailand, sak yant, traditionally rendered by Buddhist monks, has offered its wearers protection for centuries. The koi fish, so prevalent in Japanese irezumi (famously worn by some Yakuza), are a symbol of good fortune. In the West, sailors chose their tattoos not so much for good luck as to ward off bad luck. As Peck told Vice back in 2017, mariners counterintuitively embraced “13” tattoos as a way to fight cosmic fire with fire. “Bad luck would come your way, it would see the number 13, see that bad luck is already there, and it would pass on by,” he said.

Before I left Cherry Bomb, exhausted and ready for Saturday the 14th, I noticed a young woman with a conspicuously large, bright suitcase. Her name was Dan. The suitcase? Dan had just landed from San Jose. She had no plans to get a tattoo on her trip, let alone before even dropping off her luggage. “My baby cousins brought me,” she said. “I really didn’t expect to visit. Everything is just unexpected.” Dan showed me her new tattoo: a pair of stars (representing those twin cousins). The way she viewed it, the randomness of her decision didn’t diminish their meaning. If anything, randomness was the meaning. “It’s very special to find something to do on Friday the 13th that you don’t normally do, when the stars align,” she said. “I don’t think it’s unlucky. It’s what you make of it.” 

It’s not what you get; it’s the fact that you were bold enough to get it. The people I spoke with on Friday the 13th mostly agreed with Dan, and with those original sailors. They reject the date’s legacy of bad luck. “I think turning that idea on its head is kind of punk, and a little irreverent,” said Batalle. In fact, simply ending the night with a new tattoo is, for some, good fortune enough. As Kelsey told me before we parted: “It’s a secret club that we're all kind of a part of, and it's something to bond over with other people.”