ARYANA GOODARZI— I can attest that almost every queer person I know has at least one tattoo. It is still rare to find Middle Eastern/North African (MENA) tattoo artists in the states, and for a huge cultural moment to be generated by queer MENA people makes me proud – and its implications go far beyond tattoos. Born in the West and raised in the diaspora, these artists found themselves able to hold the at-onceness of their identities through ink.
As I write this, I can count 15 tattoos on myself, many of which have queer and MENA undertones. I have an overtly sapphic Georgia O’Keefe tattoo, a Botero painting of a man in a dress, and more.