Dressed in a black shirt and pants, his hair pulled back in a tidy bun, David Allen could pass for a therapist or perhaps a hipster undertaker.
But Allen deals with the living — sometimes the barely living.
Some people come to Allen’s Ravenswood studio when they are defeated, their bodies, in the words of one of Allen’s clients, resembling “a nuclear wasteland.”
Allen also tattoos men, but for this particular work, his clients are almost all women — women who seek healing beyond what a surgeon’s scalpel and needle can do.
Allen remembers his very first mastectomy tattoo client, some 12 years ago.
“She thought my style was kind of delicate, not so harsh,” Allen, 46, said. To her, “it looked like a pencil drawing. She thought my work would look good over a single mastectomy.”
So Allen inked the woman’s breast with a magnolia flower. The woman cried as he eased the needle into the dense, fibrous tissue.
“The body holds trauma, right? So sometimes it’s tears of joy, like, ‘I’m on the other side of this. This is a demarcation,’” Allen said.
Allen is flying to New York next week to tattoo the woman again, at least their seventh session together, he says.
His work is not cheap: $3,000 for one breast, $4,500 for two.
Before the ink begins to flow, Allen will spend a lot of time listening, trying to understand his client’s needs.
“Some people are emotionally in a different space. So they don’t mind their scar, they actually like their scar or they’re proud of it … They just want something near it or something to adorn it.”
Allen’s website displays before and after photographs — dark, ropy scar tissue given new life with roses, peonies or gladioli all in perpetual bloom.
“It’s floral because it’s very organic, and sometimes people need revisions — they have to have surgery again,” he said. “If I did a bird, the bird could get its head cut off, but I can fix a leaf or a stem or a petal pretty easily.”
Allen’s artistry is in demand globally. He has, he said, hundreds of people on his waiting list. He recently returned from a trip to Italy to tattoo a mastectomy client.
“I’m in a spot now where predominantly clients travel in from all over the world, which is humbling and intense … ” he said. “We need more people who do these tattoos at the level that could be done.”
But this work isn’t for everyone.
“You share stories. You hear the weight of what they went through,” he said. “Sometimes they’re in a good spot. Sometimes maybe they [recently] went to therapy, and they’ve worked through mortality issues.”
Sometimes Allen shares his own story.
When he was a baby, he had open heart surgery. His thymus, a gland found in the chest between the lungs, was 13 times larger than it should have been, he said.
“I was going to die. So they flew me to [the now-shuttered] Michael Reese Hospital,” he said. “They sawed me open, and I’m here now.”
He opens his shirt to reveal a half-inch-wide vertical scar in the center of his chest. He has tattoos on either side — a human skull and a catfish — but the scar is unadorned.
“I don’t usually talk about it, but I do tell my mastectomy clients. So they understand I’m coming from somewhere relatable in my own way,” he said.
Relatable to a degree, he says.
Lisa Brecht, 59, came to Allen’s studio in 2020, after having chemotherapy with 36 rounds of radiation treatment for cancer in her left breast.
“Put a marshmallow in a campfire, and it comes back all black and flamey. That was what the upper quadrant of my body looked like,” said Brecht, who lives in Minneapolis.
She was left with a tight tangle of physical and emotional pain.
She chose to have English rose vines curving across her chest.
“Those tattoos were an opportunity to reclaim something and, for me, they are my badge of honor,” she said.
Most, but not all, of Allen’s clients survive their breast cancer.
“I’ve lost quite a few clients,” he says, his voice becoming husky. “You don’t stop everything suddenly because you’re going to die in three months. In fact, [those clients] are more present with you than anybody in the world. You sit there, and they hang on everything you’re going to say. It’s beautiful.”