A handful of studies connect tattoos to trauma recovery. People describe getting control back over their own bodies, marking survival, telling a life story on skin. Thin as it is, that research exists, mostly in psychology and counselor education programs.

Self harm scar cover up has been studied from one direction only. A single study interviewed tattoo artists about covering scars. Nobody has asked the clients what the experience meant to them.

Neurodivergent tattoo experience has exactly one quantitative study, and it frames body modification as a symptom of impulsivity. Nothing exists on sensory experience, meaning making, or identity for autistic and ADHD people getting tattooed. Nothing on why so many of us end up choosing tattoos on our own terms after years of not having control over our own bodies.

We are not filling this gap from the outside. We work inside it every day.

Reclamation Tattoo was built by Cami Thurber, an autistic ADHDer who spent years thinking the problem was her before she got diagnosed and realized the actual problem: the world was not built for nervous systems like hers. That included tattoo shops. Especially tattoo shops.

Standard shops are loud, unpredictable, and run entirely on the artist's terms, leaving the client with almost no control over their own experience. Cami tried to work inside that model for years. It never fit. When she opened her own studio, she built it around the thing she had actually been missing: environmental peace, consent, and control, with sensory attunement treated as a core principle instead of something to accommodate quietly or apologize for.

It turned out her clients had been looking for exactly that, without knowing there was a word for it. This proposal comes out of that same position: we are not approaching neurodivergent tattoo experience as outside observers. We are proposing to study what we already live and work inside every day.

Sensory and environmental research. Why sound, pacing, and physical setup matter as much as technique. Studio lighting has to stay bright enough for an artist to work safely, so accommodation there comes through options like eye masks rather than changing the room itself. What sensory attuned care actually looks like in a tattoo session, and how to measure whether it works.

Identity and healing research. What it means to mark your body on your own terms after a late diagnosis, after years of masking, after living in a body that did not cooperate with you. How tattooing functions as part of that process for neurodivergent people specifically, not just trauma survivors generally.

Clinical research on scar cover up work. How scar cover up tattoos function for people recovering from self harm, a question almost nobody has asked the clients themselves. This includes technique and safety specific to scarred and structurally atypical skin, an area we have direct hands on experience with.

If you work anywhere near trauma, neurodivergence, art therapy, occupational therapy, or body modification, we want to talk. This isn't something we want to run alone, and formal research methodology isn't where our training is, so we're looking for a partner to lead on that side: a graduate student who needs a thesis topic, a capstone placement, a dissertation project, or a researcher who has been circling this exact gap and hasn't had the site or the population to study it.

What we bring is the site, the population, and years of direct, hands on expertise in trauma-informed, sensory-safe practice. What we're looking for is someone who brings the research training, and who wants to build the study together with us rather than just extract data from us. If that's you, or if you know who that might be, we want a conversation, a citation check, or an introduction, not a grant and not blind trust in what we tell you.

If this describes something you have felt but never seen studied, you are the reason this project exists. You do not need to be a client here to follow along. We will share updates as the research and the partnerships develop, and there will be ways to contribute your own experience if and when we build that piece out.

If you want to understand what a research minded, neurodivergence focused tattoo studio actually looks like in practice, reach out. We would rather talk to you directly than have this project summarized secondhand.