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“We’re really in the business of selling pain,” chuckles Li Manman, the co-founder of Temple Tattoo. “And after the numbing experience of the last three years, people may want the pain to feel alive again.”
At another workstation inside the three-story tattoo parlor, 64-year-old Li Wenhui is getting ready for her first tattoo: a mandala-inspired pattern on her back. “We just need beauty in our lives, no matter our age,” she tells TWOC, oblivious to the many challenges those tasked with creating that beauty are facing—like finding the mental capacity for creative work under financial pressure, especially during the pandemic.
Manman founded the tattoo parlor with a close friend and business partner in 2017. It now attracts not only customers young and old, male and female, but also tattoo artists lured by the promise of space to create, rather than struggling to make ends meet. Unlike the many traditional studios where the artist is usually also the business owner and manager, Temple operates under a salon model where tattooists are paid commissions and the parlor takes care of logistics like marketing, bookings, and supplies so the tattooists can (in theory) be free to focus on the art.
During the pandemic, Manman, who is not a tattooist herself, lived off savings for months around the time Chengdu was locked down in September 2022. Many of the tattooists-in-residence now at Temple faced similar challenges: “To work alone was quite challenging for me,” says Jiran, a 30-year-old tattooist from Guangxi who has been tattooing since around 2012, and ran her own business out of her apartment until 2021, when she began to struggle due to Covid restrictions. “I was charging too little money alone. All I wanted was to make good works, not money.” Since joining the parlor in 2021, Jiran claims she has a more stable stream of customers and income, even though she’s not paid a base salary.
Temple charges customers an hourly flat fee of around 1,200 yuan, up from 800 yuan when the parlor first opened, but the studio takes a cut of 50 percent, leaving the remainder to the tattooists. Manman and Santong, Temple’s general manager, take care of finding, filtering, and forwarding new clients, as well as providing aftercare once the tattoos are done, including taking visual records of completed works.
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