'Tattoo You': the Wider Meanings of Western Body Art

Throughout history, societies from around the world have valued tattoos. The art of permanently marking one’s body is a human custom which stretches back to antiquity. Archaic tribal cultures used tattoos to illustrate the status of their inhabitants, including the superiority of certain members. Some tribes, one author argued, even viewed the ‘unelaborated body’ as ‘imperfect, unfinished, and even ugly’ [1]. All social-cultural systems have embedded the inked body, whatever their design, in a shared code of meanings and values. In all contexts, tattoos are signs which communicate information about the wearer. 

A photo collage showing the Red Hot Chili Peppers and their tattoos.
Source: Red Hot Chili Peppers,
Blood Sugar Sex Magik (Warner Brothers, 1991).

In the West, for instance, tattoos once held a negative connotation. Society typically associated tattoos with subversion and aggressive masculinity. Tattoos also signified social stigmatisation. For example, French authorities tattooed prisoners, such as ‘V’ for ‘voleur’ (thief), well into the late eighteenth-century to signal the crimes they had committed to wider society [2]. In doing so, they created permanent body markings for a strictly utilitarian purpose.

Today, these interpretive conventions are long gone. Tattoos are more socially acceptable as western societies now view permanent body-markings as art. Available to both men and women, tattoos are a form of self-expression. Tattooing is a custom in common, a form of popular culture, based entirely on its artistic charm. But the wider meanings of aesthetic tattoos still vary according to their social context, and these meanings remain contested by people who seek to understand the popularity of tattoos in Western, industrialised societies.

The evolution of tattoos into their aesthetic purpose happened in Japan during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Tattoos lost their stigmatizing meaning, and whole-body tattoos (known as irezumi) developed into an actual artistic practice [3]. Somehow, perhaps through maritime trade after Japan’s isolation in the mid-nineteenth-century, this view of tattoos as art came to the West. As a cultural import, this view brought a gradual shift in the public’s treatment of tattoos and their wearers. Nowadays, people seek tattoo artists to fulfil a certain desire – that is, to express themselves with visual designs. 

Current tattoos, according to Pasi Falk, a scholar, are about elaborating one’s body for the sake of an artful appearance. Artists now see the body as a piece of ‘raw material’ ready for use. It is a blank canvas which awaits the first drop of paint. Once marked, artists reshape the body into something new. They ‘transform the body from nature to culture’, signifying someone’s cultural instincts to potential viewers. Like so, tattoos confuse western traditions of art that demarcate subject from object; artist from the work of art itself. The body becomes a cultural object which at once signifies the type of person that inhabits it and their relation to society at large.

Sociologically speaking, tattoos have implications on the everyday presentation of the self. Through external moulding, tattoo-wearers shape who they are, reforming their own sense of core identity values. Tattoos are, in a way, an extension of the interior self which serve a social purpose: they seek to create a stronger impression of how wearers perceive themselves. Therefore, tattoos have a controlling function which signify the identity wearers ‘want to project to others’ [4].

In 2017, two scholars offered this position in a study about the psychological meanings of tattoos. They interviewed a wide range of tattoo-wearers to talk about their ‘therapeutic potential’, arguing that tattoos are about crafting a positive body image of oneself [5]. Tattoos allow wearers to deflect a prescribed socio-cultural notion of the ideal body and are more about control of the emotions rather than anything else [6]. The authors claimed that various media channels, such as mass advertising, shape and dictate how we perceive our bodies. Tattoo wearers reclaim their bodies from ‘societally imposed ideas of the perfect’, serving as an ‘alternative therapy for coping with body dissatisfaction’ created by images of the ideal human being [7]. 

Overall, they said, tattoos welcome the ‘death of a former identity’ ruined by Western media channels and encourage wearers to view themselves positively through the ‘birth of a new one’ [8]. Here, tattoos resist a top-down view of the body. Tattoos remain subversive in that they refute a hegemonic system of thought which imposes a view of the ideal body state. Tattoos reclaim an individual’s autonomous view of themselves, promoting a positive mental perception of the skin they inhabit.

Based on empirical evidence, this article’s argument is convincing. Various studies have shown that men and women experienced lower appearance anxiety after receiving their tattoos [9]. Viren Swami, a researcher, showed that men reported lower social physique anxiety within the initial month of obtaining their first tattoos [10]. In cases of low self-esteem, tattoos are beneficial.

Amidst this positivity, tattoos still stand in politically contested terrain. Some corporate bodies still penalise tattoo-wearers for the visibility of their designs. In terms of collective identity, businesses hope to preserve a stable image of themselves by eliminating the individual’s right to free expression. Big businesses view tattoos within a very concrete interpretive schema which should warn us against their perception of individuality. 

The identity standards that corporate bodies maintain are oppressive. Tattoo-wearers remain under the heel of western attitudes in the workplace. The argument presented here should alter such a depressing train of thought. Tattoos signal the complexities of the human condition and the necessary role that art plays in our everyday lives. Individuals in power need to acknowledge the positive impact of permanent body art in order to understand the mainstreaming of tattoos in Western societies.

Notes:

[1] Pasi Falk, ‘Written in the Flesh’ Body and Society, 1/1 (1995), p.  98.

[2] ibid., p. 97.

[3] ibid., p. 98.

[4] Jessica Strübel and Domenique Jones, ‘Painted Bodies: Representing the Self and Reclaiming the Body through Tattoos’ Journal of Popular Culture, 50/6 (2017), p. 1240.

[5] ibid., p. 1231.

[6] ibid.

[7] ibid., p. 1248; p. 1232.

[8] ibid., p. 1253.

[9] ibid.

[10] Viren Swami, ‘Marked for Life? A Prospective Study of Tattoos on Appearance Anxiety and Dissatisfaction, Perceptions of Uniqueness and Self-Esteem’ Body Image, 8/3 (2011), p. 242.