inkbluesky

Alyssa ’s ankle tattoo

Depending on one’s POV body art or body eyesore has been around for a few thousand years. If a person could imagine an image or design there has been someone there to translate it into body ink, done for reasons that range from the personal to the obsessive, to the erotic, to sublime reflection and religious tribute. Frankly, in modern times some of the reasons are so arcane only a psychiatrist with tons of patience could dig out the reason. After viewing a few episodes of Inked ( if you liked there theme song its available for download here ) it seems to me at least some of the time that the reasons given for the tattoo don’t match the person’s persona. There’s also a kind of bumper sticker mentality that has been transferred to the body. Rather then a sticker on your car that expresses something about who or what you are, you express that with body ink. The popularity of tattoos has certainly ebbed and weaned over the centuries and I’m not sure, but the current enthusiasm for body decoration or personal expression through body ink seems like its going to be around for a while. I found this article at the Village Voice that suggests that one of the major reasons that tattooing is so popular now is because its been adopted by the middle-class ( usual that curses a hip trend to die a quick death). Pretty in Ink

DeMello’s outsider status, combined with her training as an anthropologist, gave her just the distance she needed to write an authoritative book that’s not—like so much ink on the subject—a piece of tattoo evangelism. She deftly sketches out American tattoo history, then identifies two key transitions: the influence, starting in the ’60s, of sophisticated Japanese designs on the American aesthetic, which sowed the seeds for the ensuing “renaissance”; and the rise of tattoo conventions and magazines in the ’70s, which established a community and set the stage for artistic competition. Through them, she writes, “middle-class competitiveness and individuality along with an elevated sense of aesthetics have been grafted onto a working-class tradition.”

Now “fit for middle-class consumption,” tattooing has been outfitted with new meanings, imported largely from non-Western cultures and channeled through what DeMello calls “tattoo narratives” that purge the practice of its unsavory sailor/biker associations. Tattoo narratives, DeMello shrewdly observes, “re-create for both the teller and the listener not only the facts of the tattoo but the complex justifications for it. . . . The narratives are dialectical in that they presuppose a questioner or listener who objects to, or at least cannot understand, the tattoo.” They emphasize individualism, spirituality, personal growth, empowerment (for women), and a reclamation of the primitive self. Some even feature “coming out” stories about unveiling a tattoo for family members and friends.

Its a smile to see where the infuences on our society come from. I read in Wired a few issues back that the new features that find their way into American cell phones are there because they’ve first been made the thing to have by teenage Japanese and South Korean girls.

(confessions, I do have a very very small Celtic cross tattoo on one ankle)

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