Times Square tourists’ NYC tattoos celebrate permanent love for the Big Apple
Their love for NYC is skin-deep.
Tourists around the world are ditching traditional souvenirs such as T-shirts and hats, and opting for edgier keepsakes — inking themselves with tattoos of the cities they’ve visited.
“Everybody wants to get a souvenir — not a mug, not a shirt, not a magnet. That’s a thing of the past. Now people are collecting tattoo souvenirs,” said Carmen Verdugo, owner of Liberty Center Tattoo Shop in Times Square.
“The popular ones are a skyline, Statue of Liberty, the word ‘New York,’ ‘New York City,’ ‘I Love New York.’ But also hot dogs, pizza, a rat eating pizza. We also did a squirrel eating an apple.”
Verdugo, 40, designed a book for her clients filled with hundreds of NYC tattoos, from a pigeon and a hot dog wrapped around a skyscraper, to the NYC Marathon logo and iconic landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, and the Twin Towers.
Carole Prieur of France got ink from Liberty Tattoo on three of her visits to the Big Apple.
On her first, in 2021, she chose a butterfly design with the letters NYC underneath it.
“I chose the butterfly because it is the symbol of rebirth, coming to New York for me was a bit like a rebirth. I returned to the land of my great-grandmother that I finally found after 30 years of searching,” she said.
Verdugo estimated 80% of her customers are tourists, and she’s inked people from all over the world.
“All kinds of countries: Canada, Poland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Iceland . . . the Netherlands, Switzerland. Yesterday, we did two people from Africa,” she said.
The mom of three sports 16 tattoos of her own.
A native of Chile, Verdugo got her first tat — a cat inside a moon — at 18, but wasn’t happy with the way it turned out.
“I found my tattoo so ugly and I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can do it better,’” she recalled, laughing.
She dabbled with painting and art as a child, but “in my country, I didn’t have the opportunity growing up as an artist. It was so difficult because I came from a really, really small town, and people thought women cannot do that kind of thing.”
When she came to New York in 2016, she first found work at a restaurant “because I didn’t speak English or know the city,” she said, and then took gigs cleaning for a construction company and working as a secretary at a plumbing business.
After the pandemic, she got her tattoo license, and joined the staff at Times Square Tattoo, where she worked for four years until it closed in June of last year.
“I used to work on West 46th Street, and I always saw an empty space. And in my mind it was like, ‘One day this place could be mine,’” she remembered.
With the encouragement of her husband, Verdugo bought the space, and opened her shop in November of last year.
She chose to name it “Liberty” because of the word’s “powerful” double meaning.
“The Statue of Liberty is the main symbol of New York,” she said. “And also, the liberty to do as you want.”
