When you think about fashion in Norway, do you kind of group it in with “the rest of Europe” in terms and styles and trends?  I typically do.  The only fashion stereotypes that I have heard before about Europe are that there are a lot of gothic dressers in Germany and in the Netherlands the girls where t-shirts and belts.  I am most likely way out of the fashion loop when it comes to all of this, but I’m interested in it anyways.  If you have any stereotypes that you would like to share, or just fashion trends in Norway you have noticed, please do!

From the time I’ve spent in Norway, I remember seeing a lot of leggings, modern-days mullets & faux-hawks, and last but not least a lot of tattoos.  I think almost every person I know in Norway in their mid-20s has at least one tattoo.  Most have several, and they are typically quite visible.  A couple of my good friends have full sleeves and imagine this-they don’t get disapproving stares from passersby.  Not only are this but many employers don’t have restrictive rules about tattoos either.  I know that in a lot of bigger cities here in the U.S. tattoos are more common and it is more acceptable if they are visible, but that is not so much the case where I live in the upper midwest.

I got a tattoo in Norway the last time I was there and because I live in the U.S. I got it on my ribcage (a location I like, no doubt); I never would get a tattoo this big in a visible place.  I would like to personally highly recommend the tattoo artist that designed my tattoo and executed it perfectly.  I literally gave him a vague idea of what I wanted: a nautical star with a rope around it and then the latitude of Tromsø, where I lived for a few months, tattooed above it.

The tattoo shop I went to is called Second Skin Tattoo and it is located in Finnsnes, in northern Norway.  The artist is a Scottish man named James.  He is amazing.  He drew on me a vague outline of what he was envisioning and then began to work.  His wife, who works in the shop with him, stood above me and stretched my skin out while James tattooed for an hour and a half.  The finished product, I told him, was “exactly what I wanted without knowing that that’s what I wanted.”

Click here to see the website for Second Skin Tattoo:

It’s probably unlikely that you will be in Finnsnes, Norway for something, and even more unlikely that you will be there and find yourself desiring a tattoo, but if you do–go to James!