The goal of this roundtable is to interrogate the history and study of US tattooing as a way to enact this year’s conference theme of sustainable publics, “to advance and cultivate learning, development, and collective engagements in public scholarship for speculative possibilities of expansive and humanizing change/justice.” Asian American frameworks and methods provide powerful tools to critique and expand the Eurocentric, white hegemonic narratives prevalent in tattoo studies, which erase the role of BIPOC communities, including Asian Americans, in the emergence, development, circulation, and application of tattoo aesthetics and practice. The common framework found within the cultural study of tattooing relies on the “great white male” narrative of artistic development and the presumption of the white normative universal body. The result of this myopic framing is the erasure of American empire, settler colonialism, militarization, and racial capitalism–that is, historical structures of domination that were enacted and maintained through the marking of specific (non-white) bodies rendered visibly abject by the US colonial racial state. How does Asian Americanist critique pose a challenge to these racial and colonial histories to highlight the role of tattooing in US racial formation and US empire? How does the unearthing of ‘buried histories’ and the centering of Asian American tattoo countercultures help us imagine liberatory intimacies, relationalities, and communities in the face of state repression and systemic social dismantling? The four presenters in this panel construct counternarratives of Asian American tattooing through interdisciplinary approaches California/West Coast tattoo cultures: a historiographical critique of the so-called “Tattoo Renaissance” and its white heteropatriarchal narratives to recenter tattoo aesthetic development within the framework of war, empire, and racial capitalism; an Asian American tattoo artist’s personal recollections of trying to define an “Asian American tattoo aesthetics” and working within a local Long Beach tattoo shop; reconstructing the forgotten history of Pinay tattooer in Hawai’i during the early 20th century and how her presence within the masculine spaces of the U.S. tattoo scene simultaneously troubled and reinforced U.S. transpacific imperial cultures over this period.; making visible the roll of prison life, gangs, and tattoos had in Asian American, Pacific Islander communities of the San Gabriel Valley. Ultimately, the participants on this roundtable collectively grapple with the question: What role does aesthetics play in recalibrating our ontological and epistemological sensory capacities to view the world anew, towards the goal of “speculative possibilities of expansive and humanizing change/justice”?