The lead story on My Yahoo! on Wednesday was a photo album from the London Tattoo Convention last week. After perusing interesting yet slightly disturbing photos of altered humans, I found that “tattoos” ranked at number 183 among all search terms, in the vicinity of “thesaurus” and “music downloads” for the four weeks ending October 15, 2005. So if as many people are searching for tattoos as music downloads, who are they, and where do they live?
One of the leading sites receiving visits from “tattoos” is Tatoos.com. Demographic analysis of the site shows that its visitors are 61% female and 59% are aged 18-34 for the four weeks ending October 15, 2005. The states that indexed the highest were West Virginia, Maine, New Mexico, Nevada, and Idaho.
All this tells me is that young women in rural states are interested in tattoo art. What else do we know about them? In conjunction with Claritas, Hitwise provides PRIZM NE Lifestyle segmentation, which is based on zip code, age and socioeconomic status. The segment with the highest index, at 283, for Tattoos.com was “Crossroads Villagers,” which is the segment I grew up in – white, rural, and blue collar. Here’s a description:

Another segment with a high index (256) for Tattoos.com is “Shotguns and Pickups,” which is Bill’s favorite segment.

I wonder, if I hadn’t moved to San Francisco, and landed in “Bohemian Mix,” a segment that shops at Anthropologie and reads Gawker, would I be interested in getting a tattoo?