Jacci Gresham is widely regarded as the United States’ first (known) Black female tattooer.

Jacci was born in 1951 in Flint, Michigan and moved to New Orleans in the 70s to open the U.S’ first Black female owned tattoo shop in 1976 with her partner Ajit Singh who taught her to tattoo after the two of them were laid off from their positions at General Motors. “General Motors had a big layoff in 1975. Ajit Singh and I decided to move to New Orleans. He was an Indian from England and knew tattooing. We both had worked at General Motors in Michigan. We opened this shop in ’76. Ajit died in ’99.” . (01/31/2008 Interview w/Brobson Lutz, MD. My New Orleans)

Aart Accent Tattoos & Body Piercing in New Orleans opened its doors for the first time in 1976 and is still in operation today, making it Louisiana’s oldest tattoo business still in business. This is especially impressive considering when Jacci started tattooing it was an industry made up of almost exclusively white men (in the US).

Jacci’s work in the industry was and continues to be important largely because she was one of the first tattooers in the West to properly develop methods for tattooing Black and Brown skinned folks that would often be turned away by tattooers for not knowing how to tattoo darker skin or claiming dark skin cannot be tattooed. This of course is a ridiculous notion considering tattooing exists in every culture world wide and dates back thousands of years.

Today, Jacci still tattoos out of Aart Accent Tattoos & Body Piercing with other artists, and has also written a childrens book called Make Your Mark: The Empowering True Story of the First Known Black Female Tattoo Artist. Jacci is a must-visit artist if you are in the New Orleans area and is a piece of tattoo history that continues to be relevant in these divisive times.