Jacci Gresham

Archive Note

Jacci Gresham was born in 1951 in Flint, Michigan, and studied architecture and engineering at Lawrence Technological University before going to work for General Motors in Detroit. Her drafting work there was the floor plans and layouts of GM automobile dealerships. Popular profiles sometimes call her a mechanical engineer. The documented work was architectural and engineering drafting, and she has long credited that drafting background for her line work, her layout sense, and her eye for proportion on the body.

At GM she met Ajit "Ali" Singh, an Indian-born engineer who held degrees in engineering and commercial art and had learned to tattoo during a residence in England. When a major GM layoff caught Gresham in the mid-1970s, most reporting points to 1975, the two friends decided to leave Detroit and start a tattoo business together. In 1976 they opened Aart Accent Tattoos and Body Piercing on North Rampart Street in New Orleans. Singh trained Gresham in the trade in the shop's early years. She had no prior tattooing experience and was not herself tattooed when the doors opened, a route into the work more typical of late-twentieth-century professionals than of the apprentice-from-childhood Bowery model.

That opening is the central fact of her place in the record. She is the first known African-American woman to own and operate a tattoo shop in the United States. Careful coverage uses "first known," leaving room for earlier Black women who may have tattooed privately or in undocumented settings, and that is the defensible framing. By opening Aart Accent she also became the first Black woman tattooing publicly in New Orleans, and by the secondary reporting she was one of fewer than a half-dozen women of any race running their own shops anywhere in the country at the time. By one account Aart Accent was the third tattoo shop in New Orleans when it opened, a figure that rests on Gresham's own recollection rather than a municipal count.

Much of the American trade in the 1970s and 1980s worked almost entirely on fair skin and treated darker skin as a niche or a refusal. Gresham's shop made a working practice of tattooing Black and brown clients across its full run, and she is widely credited within the Black tattoo community with showing that good color and good line work are achievable across a wide range of skin tones. That is a central plank of how she is written about in the Black-tattoo-history coverage that grew through the 2010s and 2020s.

Singh died in 1995. From that year until the closure Gresham ran the shop alone, managing the business, the artists who worked there, and a long-term client base that press coverage has reported included Alicia Keys and Tim McGraw. Aart Accent operated continuously on North Rampart Street from 1976 until Labor Day, September 5, 2022, when she closed the storefront after the building was sold. At forty-six years it was the oldest continuously operating tattoo shop in Louisiana. After a short break she resumed tattooing in a private studio, where she still takes selected clients.

Gresham sits at the late end of a long line in American women's tattooing that runs from Maud Stevens Wagner through Mildred Hull and Betty Broadbent, carrying it into the post-Civil-Rights, post-NYC-ban South. In 2011 she was honored as a "Pioneer of Female Tattoo Artists" at a National Tattoo Association event, the existence of the recognition reliably reported even where the citation specifics are not transcribed. In 2024 she co-published a children's book about her life, Make Your Mark, with Sherry Fellores and David Wilkerson. Across nearly fifty years she has been a teacher, employer, and reference figure for American tattooers, and for the wave of Black women entering the trade she is the precedent who proved the career was possible.

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