Raspberry Thorn forever

Tattooist Rachel Mattson has always had a certain connection with raspberries.

“Rachel Raspberry has always been a nickname of mine,” Mattson explained. “My dad gave it to me. I go raspberry picking every year for my birthday. Raspberries are just an integral part of my life.”

With a tendency toward creative projects that involve needles — on top of tattooing, Mattson is also a fiber artist who makes rugs and wall hangings and dabbles in felting — Mattson identifies with the poky nature of the plant, as well.

“When I was picking a name for my tattoo business, I thought, ‘naturally I have to pick something with raspberries… They have thorns… Oh my gosh, that’s perfect!’”

Mattson owns Raspberry Thorn Tattoo, where she is one of only a handful of artists in Wisconsin to offer hand-poke tattoos — tattoos inked by hand rather than using a tattoo gun. You might know them by the name ‘stick-and-poke,’ although Mattson stressed that there’s nothing to fear about the method itself.

“There’s a lot of misconceptions when it comes to hand poking,” Mattson explained. “The biggest one is that hand pokes are gonna be more painful. I think if you’re getting a tattoo in your basement by a friend who’s never done it before, it is gonna not be a great experience, but because I do it professionally, I had an apprenticeship and I understand depth and where everything needs to go, I know what I need to do. The level of pain is gonna be the same [as a machine tattoo,] but it will feel different.”

To put Mattson’s claims to the test, I decided to set up a tattoo appointment of my own. After filling out a form on Mattson’s website that will probably look familiar to anyone who’s scheduled a tattoo appointment before, I was set.

Raspberry Thorn Tattoo is located on Washington St., just a few storefronts down from local favorite Red Eye Brewing Company. Inside, it’s got the vibes of a coffee shop, minus the crowd: plants rescued from Mattson’s cats at home, plenty of comfy seating and decor gathered from antique shops and creatively inclined friends… not to mention the collection of miniature books, shrunken-down copies of existing New York Times bestsellers such as The Vampire Diaries.

Anyone who tells you that getting a tattoo doesn’t hurt is lying. For some, the pain of getting inked is the entire point, with the procedure serving as a test of endurance or a rite of passage of sorts. The level of pain will vary based on the part of the body being tattooed, the complexity and size of the tattoo and the state of a person’s skin at the time. Hand poke tattoos are no exception.

What differentiates hand poke tattoos from those drawn using machines, however, is the type of pain. People often compare the feeling of getting a tattoo to receiving a series of cat scratches. From my own experience, I find this an oversimplification. When explaining what it’s like to get a tattoo, I describe it as feeling like my skin is being grazed by a cat’s claw, hard enough to feel it but not enough to break the skin — neither comfortable nor pleasant, but not painful… at least, at first. As those grazes build up, your skin gets more and more tender until even those little grazes can feel torturous. For this reason, people will often break up getting bigger pieces into several appointments, with multiple weeks in between them to allow the skin time to heal.

I did not have this same experience with my hand-poked tattoo. While the pain of each poke was sharper — a similar feeling, fittingly enough, to if you’ve ever poked yourself with a needle while sewing, or with a thumbtack — it remained consistent the whole way through, even on subsequent rounds across my skin. When I mentioned this, Mattson told me that this is pretty typical: Because she inks a tattoo onto skin one precise poke at a time as opposed to a tattoo machine’s multiple pokes per second, she’s able to avoid irritating the skin more than necessary.

“It’s a lot less trauma on your skin because I am manually poking instead of the machine going in and out,” Mattson explained. “Your skin is going to heal a lot better.”

Three days after receiving my Raspberry Thorn tattoo, Mattson’s claims have held up. My hand-poked tattoo is absent the usual, for lack of a better word, goop — the spooky looking concoction of ink and biofluids — that oozes out in the early days of the typical tattoo healing process. While I can’t claim that either healing process is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than the other, thus far, I prefer the cleanness of the hand poke’s.

The health of our skin depends largely on our mood, and Mattson has seen the impacts of a bad mood on the tattooing process firsthand. As we chatted during our session, she told me about a time when a client’s mood took a turn for the worse in the middle of a session. The client’s skin had been reacting well to the procedure when they took a break so that the client could answer a call. When the client returned, their mood had soured after receiving bad news from a loved one, and their skin became easily inflamed and weepy.

This article won’t go into the science of how or why this happens, but you may have dealt with stress-induced acne, psoriasis or eczema flare-ups before. You might consider these sister conditions to what Mattson’s client experienced. When we’re stressed, our skin responds in kind.

It’s for this reason that a comfortable environment ranks among the top of the ‘positive tattoo experience’ hierarchy of needs, and it’s an element that Mattson works hard to provide. When she decided she wanted to become a tattoo artist, it was in part because she saw that almost all of Wausau’s tattoo artists were men. At the time, only one tattoo shop in the city was woman owned, so it was there that she sought her apprenticeship.

“I like to service people that are marginalized,” Mattson said. “Like, that’s why I started tattooing. The tattoo industry is very male dominated, and we’re definitely turning a point where there’s a lot more women, a lot more queer people tattooing, but Wausau is very male dominated.”

As a result, Mattson said, the kinds of clients that Raspberry Thorn attracts are typically women and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Combined with a unique art style and subject matter — anything that tickles Mattson’s fancy, from Interview with the Vampire to redraws of art painted during medieval times — it’s a niche that Mattson is happy to fill, so much so that she couldn’t pick a favorite part of the job.

“I like making the art,” Mattson said. “I love tattooing. Just, like, doing it is super meditative to me, and I love talking to people, and it’s super fun getting to know everyone. I have such a great time.”

It’s an energy that draws people in from all over.

“A lot of people travel to see me,” said Mattson. “Yesterday, I had someone from Waukesha and Stevens Point. [I’ve got] a lot of the people coming from the Appleton area, coming from the Eau Claire area, from up north. I’ve had people come from a couple hours away, so people are traveling to see me.” Mattson has even tattooed people who live as far away as Nebraska and Seattle, former Wisconsinites in town to visit family.

“I think that that’s… an important part of what I do,” said Mattson, “being able to be that safe space for people that they’re willing to come from different directions and feel safe enough and comfortable enough to travel. Not everyone likes to travel.”

For more information or to book an appointment with Raspberry Thorn Tattoo, check out raspberrythorn on Instagram, Raspberrythorn on Facebook or Mattson’s website, https://www.leannamatta.com/raspberry-thorn.