Exclusive | Forget T-shirts – Times Square tourists are celebrating NYC’s enduring love with tattoos

Their love for NYC runs deep.

Tourists around the world are ditching traditional souvenirs like t-shirts and hats, and opting for more beautiful mementos – getting tattoos of the cities they’ve visited.

“Everyone wants to get a souvenir – not a mug, not a shirt, not a magnet. This is a thing of the past. Now people are collecting tattoo souvenirs,” said Carmen Verdugo, owner of Liberty Center Tattoo Shop in Times Square.

“The familiar ones are a skyline, the Statue of Liberty, the word ‘New York,’ ‘New York City,’ ‘I love New York.’ But also hot dogs, pizza, a mouse 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 dove and hot dog wrapped around a skyscraper to the NYC Marathon logo and iconic landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, Chrysler and Empire State Buildings. and the Twin Towers.

France’s Carole Prieur got inked by Liberty Tattoo on three of her visits to the Big Apple.

In her first, in 2021, she chose a butterfly design with the letters NYC below it.

“I chose the butterfly because it is the symbol of rebirth, coming to New York was a bit like a rebirth for me. I returned to my great-grandmother’s land that I finally found after 30 years of searching,” she said.

Verdugo estimated that 80% of her customers are tourists and she is inked people from all over the world.

“All kinds of countries: Canada, Poland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Iceland. . . Netherlands, Switzerland. Yesterday we made two people from Africa”, she said.

The mother of three has 16 tattoos of her own.

A native of Chile, Verdugo got her first tattoo — a cat on a moon — at age 18, but she wasn’t happy with how it turned out.

“My tattoo looked really ugly and I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can do better,'” she recalls with a laugh.

She was involved in painting and art as a child, but “in my country I didn’t have the opportunity to grow up as an artist. It was so hard because I came from a really, really small town and people thought women couldn’t do this kind of thing.”

When she came to New York in 2016, she first got 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 recalled.

With her husband’s encouragement, Verdugo bought the space and opened her store last November.

She chose to name it “Liberty” because of the word’s dual “powerful” meaning.

“The Statue of Liberty is the main symbol of New York,” she said. “And also, the freedom to do as you please.”