Nine Tattoos and No Apologies
Her first tattoo is on her stomach: "Go big or go home." Very Texas, she admits. It’s a good encapsulation of Hattie Watson—the red-haired, freckle-covered model who grew up in one of America’s more prudish states before deciding that posing nude for a camera was a perfectly reasonable career move. When I spoke with her she was in London for the first time, a little dazzled, quietly wondering whether she could actually live there.
She has nine tattoos at the time of our conversation, with plans for more—both arms eventually, and a vulture on her thigh. None of them carry what she’d call deep meaning. They are all just part of my personality and things I like and enjoy,
she says. I find this honest in a way most people aren’t about their ink. Not everything is grief or triumph. Some things are just what you wanted on your body that week.
Watson grew up wanting to model but chose sports instead, then drifted back into it after working at a photography studio where the photographer pointed a camera at her and asked her to step in front of it. She did. The nudity came later, though she’s quick to correct any impression that it defines her work—she doesn’t do much of it, she says, and she’s actively moving away from it toward fashion and editorial. She wants to work with designers. She wants magazine covers. The nude stuff was a chapter, not the whole book.
I asked her the obvious crude question—how does it feel knowing men are jerking off to your photos—and her answer was better than I deserved. Really anything stimulates men. They are men. I could easily do that being clothed, maybe smoking a cigarette or just with my hair in pigtails.
She’s not dismissive, just matter-of-fact. She laughs at the pervy emails and deletes them. The female fan mail, she says, tends to be nicer. I believe her.
The red hair and freckles she’s known for are something she’s made peace with in a way that feels earned rather than performed. She always loved the hair. The freckles were harder—she wanted porcelain skin as a kid, the way a lot of redheaded girls do when other children are making their lives miserable. But she’s come around. I guess they add character.
And they do. There’s a whole subgenre of photography built around exactly that face—the kind that reads as simultaneously otherworldly and completely real.
Her taste in music runs toward the melancholy and the ornate: Tom Waits, Cat Power, Bon Iver, Beirut, Air, Band of Horses. This tracks. There’s something in that constellation of artists that shares a sensibility—patient, a little wounded, beautiful without trying to be pretty. She hadn’t watched any films in a while when we spoke, but the last ones she loved were Cashback and Me Without You, which are both, in their different ways, films about longing and the strangeness of growing up. Also tracks.
A perfect night, for her, is either dancing with friends or sitting at home being a nerd. I miss my video games,
she says, and I find this genuinely endearing—the model from Texas who’d rather be grinding through a campaign than working a room. Her fans she calls her "little creepsters," which is affectionate in the way that only works if you actually mean it. She seems to mean it.
What she wants from a shoot is something that cuts against expectation—editorial work with an eerie edge, or just something genuinely strange. I really like pretty ugly photos. Girls that are gorgeous but doing something that you wouldn’t expect them to do.
That’s a real aesthetic position, and it’s more interesting than anything most working models would say in an interview. The best images of her bear it out—there’s always something slightly off, in the best sense, about the framing or the mood or what she’s doing with her face.
She loves the American landscape, the national parks she keeps meaning to visit more of, the way the scenery shifts across the continent. London has her considering whether she could make a life somewhere outside the States. She probably could. She seems like someone who carries her personality intact wherever she lands, which is the only quality that actually matters for that kind of life.