After a few years of tattooing in private spaces, Longhaul currently tattoos at Charon Art Visionary Tattoo , where they base their practice around “compassionate or empathic collaboration.” Longhaul has worked mostly with trans and queer folk and is “particularly interested in supporting people in their process of building homes for their spirits out of their bodies; particularly bodies that are ‘complicated,’ marginalised, or criminalised.”

Longhaul, 25, is a Great Falls, Massachusetts-based tattoo artist, artist, folk musician , and witch. They identify as both a non-binary trans person and a trans woman, and uses she/hers and they/them pronouns. With a BFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, they have also done plenty of installation art and had a woodcut practice, all of which is evident in their tattoo style.

The best word to describe Noel’le Longhaul’s tattoos is “primeval.” Even when freshly inked and uploaded onto her Instagram , they look like illustrations from an ancient grimoire or a book of disappeared folk tales, passed through the generations and probably bound in human skin. Her signatures are black-and-white with rustles of colour, intricate Edward-Gorey-does-Where’s-Waldo-level detail, and intriguing pockets of negative space. Wild animals and witches make their appearances, but mostly her portfolio is filled with portals to thickets, mountains, and other expanses of wilderness. Stare too long and you might fall in.

How did you begin tattooing?

Noel’le Longhaul: I got a couple of tattoos in shops when I turned 18, and none of those experiences felt good. I didn’t feel well-treated by the people I was working with. Something went wrong somewhere in the transactional nature of the whole procedure that kind of turned me off from the whole culture. Around that time my friends and I just started tattooing each other in pretty crude, sewing needle and thread ways. But it was something that rose up as special and it was something that rose up as being a way for us to have this access to a ritual that actually did something as powerful as leaving a little mark on each other’s bodies or on our own bodies. And it became a really important way for my friends and me to be marking time and to be finding new ways to contextualise our bodies and tell our stories and it never really mattered a whole lot what it actually looked like, it just mattered that it was a thing you did together.

I had a really hard time the whole time (I was going to school), but I had one year in particular that I just didn’t leave my room very much and just spent a lot of that time tattooing myself with this tattoo machine. It was just this way for me to actually maintain a grip on my body and use it as a tether to reality in a context where I was otherwise very untethered from reality and very untethered from my body. I came out of that year with just a bunch of tattoos on me and people just started asking me who did them and I just told them that I did them and people just started asking me to tattoo them.

You mentioned that you felt uncomfortable in the commercial tattoo shops where you got your tattoos when you turned 18. What sort of things were they doing that you felt just wasn’t right?

Noel’le Longhaul: I felt like there was a culture around repressing the inherent intensity and the inherent intimacy of the process of tattooing. I felt like that was something that was largely circumscribed by the masculinity of the shops that I was in. I feel like the cultures that the bulk of contemporary American tattooing come from are military cultures, and the conservatism that has risen up around the artwork that has come out of that, but also around how people are allowed to enter the tattoo world and what the right way to tattoo is, comes from this bank of tattooing being a product of wartime, male bonding rituals and is just really violent and carries that violence. And I just didn’t want any part there.

How would you describe your tattooing style or technique?

Noel’le Longhaul: I don’t really feel like I’ve ever just not been free-forming. I’m really interested in my tattoos doing things where they can acknowledge the intensity and the chaos and the volume of people’s narratives. And then I also want to get that to a place where there can still be a sensation of stillness around what it means to be holding that and carrying that. I try to have my tattoos feel as though they’re detailed to the point where every hair on the head is accounted for and paid attention to and loved, but for the extent of that chaos to total up to something that makes sense and is legible.

“I’m really interested in my tattoos doing things where they can acknowledge the intensity and the chaos and the volume of people’s narratives” – Noel’le Longhaul

So would you describe your tattooing as a form of healing or care, especially for marginalised bodies?

Noel’le Longhaul: For me to claim that my practice was a healing practice would be an immensely hubristic gesture. Also, my ideas of healing have changed in the last couple of years. I don’t think the things that I’ve experienced as traumatic in my life have actually healed, I just think I get better at incorporating them. As a tattoo artist, I want my role to be an aide towards incorporation, and to have experiences that need to be brought closer to us brought closer to us.

Do you identify as a witch and how would you describe your practice?

Noel’le Longhaul: There’s a history that I’m participating in, a history that is circumscribed by emotional labour on the part of femmes. It’s circumscribed by all of the other gender violence that goes along with that. It’s also circumscribed by the repression of a host of other things that I could talk about in terms of magic. Ritual and practices certainly don’t function within a denomination for me, but essentially I identify with a lineage of knowledge that people talk about as starting with the idea of witches. I also identify with the sensation of the loss of collective knowledge and I feel interested in participating in a collective pursuit towards a heretofore unimagined world. For me, I can’t separate the ideas of having any kind of magic practice as being anything that is not fully in service to the destruction of patriarchy and white supremacy and colonialism. I’m fascinated by the myriad openings that can be taken every day.

How does your tattooing intersect with your participation in witchcraft or magic?

Noel’le Longhaul: For me, a lot of the study of those things is overlapping in terms of just trying to pay attention to what is actually happening around one. For me, those practices are mutual practices of radical listening. I also think that tattooing, very simply put, is blood magic and I think that it’s something that is inherently very intense to do. People can choose to participate in that sensation to varying degrees, and certainly there’s no obligation to participate in that sensation, but finding a ritual as a method of marking time is something that for me feels like it holds a chance to experience a narrative of time that is different from the narratives of time that all the crap in one’s life suggests one think about things in. I also think that any time we intentionally change our bodies, we’re doing magic, and I think that doing that in a way that feels intentional and feels respectful and consensual is also the ways in which those things overlap.