Avery Osajima, 26, tattoo artist
Seattle, WA
Avery, sheltering in place in Seattle, WA
Aside from your creative work do you have any additional source of income?
Nope! Tattooing is my full time job.
Who do you live with and how do you feel about that?
I live with my two best friends, my partner, and a small sleepy dog. I feel very grateful to be stuck inside with some of my most favorite people in the world.
How are you spending your time?
I've been going on lots of long walks, just sort of picking a direction and a person to call and then just walking and talking for hours sometimes. Since I can't tattoo, I've sort of pivoted to selling prints, postcards, stickers, things like that. I've never done product development before so lots of fumbling around trying to teach myself this whole new job basically, how to set up files for print, fulfill orders, source packaging, etc. I'm listening equal parts to these really intense investigative journalism and philosophical/spiritual podcasts and all this early 2000s R&B.
How is the pandemic impacting you?
I've been out of work for two months now so the financial piece has been stressful. Now that Washington has updated its system for self-employed people to be eligible for unemployment assistance, that has lessened some but on some really fundamental level I just really, really miss tattooing. I turned 26 in the middle of all this and got kicked off my health insurance so I went through this whole spell of being really stressed and pissed about how poorly our healthcare system is set up for us as actual humans. The scapegoating and targeting of Asian folks around COVID-19 has also been stirring up all of this old historical trauma I'm still carrying from the targeting and eventual incarceration of my family by the US government during WWII, so I've been doing a lot of sitting with those hand-me-down ghosts.
What do you want to accomplish personally and/or professionally during this time?
I'm just trying to keep my heart open to the beautiful and frightening transformative potential of this time, even though it feels like I'm deep in the churn some days. This time has given me some really incredible and terrifying clarity on some of the things I've been scheming and dreaming about for a long time now, which I haven't announced widely yet but look forward to beginning the process of making concrete.
What kind of world do you want to see on the other side of this?
I think many of us have had at least a seed of desire for things to be different for a long time, a sense in our hearts that something is not right. But the momentum of business as usual and the perpetually escalating pressures, obligations, and blistering pace of capitalism make any sort of focused visioning very difficult to maintain, much less any sort of sustained principled action. I hope the rupturing that we're experiencing in this crisis can give way to that something else we've been holding closely, maybe very deeply inside ourselves, maybe since we were very small. This crisis has brought about the implementation of measures that previously felt unfathomable -- moratoriums on evictions, the expansion of unemployment assistance, mortgage relief -- but are in truth are these really basic protections. As a self-employed person, it never even crossed my mind that unemployment assistance should be something I could ask for, much less expect and demand from my government. I hope we can move into a world where we have a greater sense of possibility for ourselves around human rights like health care and workers' protections, greater clarity in what to ask for, and greater resolve in how to go about it all.
How can people find you and support you and your work?
You can find my work on my instagram at @averykiyo, and purchase prints and things on my website here: averykiyo.com/shop