Encylopedia of Body Adornment.pdf - Print My Tattoo

76 CONTEMPORARY TATTOOING
using the language from transformational social movements, all of which provided
a symbolic and discursive context for the artistic changes occurring within
tattooing.
I designed my own tattoo and it
consists of religious symbols from
around the world, it’s an armband
that goes around my arm. There’s
an Egyptian hieroglyph, a Mayan hieroglyph,
the Venus of Wellendorf,
a cave painting called “the sorcerer,”
an African drum, a cave painting of
a dancer. I wanted to feel that I was
part of an earth-tribe-clan-thing. I
felt like I was connecting to more ancient
cultures.
ANONYMOUS
Tattooing has changed not only in
terms of the artists, the professionalism,
and the meanings behind the designs.
The designs themselves have changed
as well. Tattoos have moved from the
badge-like designs common for hundreds
of years in the West to designs,
again, borrowed from non-Western cultures,
which use the whole body or
large portions of it. Designs have also
moved from simple cartoonish representations
of pop culture icons to abstract
representations, created on a custom
basis for the individual client,
rather than pulled off of the wall in a
tattooist’s studio.
Contemporary tattooists prefer to do
custom work, that is, work that was created
by them, usually with the help of
the client, rather than taken directly off of the wall. While there are still far more
street shops than custom-only shops in this country, most tattooists who have
started tattooing since the 1980s try to do as little flash work as possible and
strongly encourage their customers to design their own tattoos.
Tattooing today is a youth-driven field, dominated by young artists with fine
art training and a high degree of technical skill and creativity, and their young
clients, with bold designs on their arms, heads, legs, and bodies, and often with
multiple piercings as well. While many of older tattoo customers choose to hide
their tattoos, many of the younger generation, without the white-collar jobs of
middle-class boomers, proudly display their tattoos on highly visible parts of their
bodies.
Within this context, tattoos have been partially transformed into fine art by
a process of redefinition and framing based on formal qualities (i.e., the skill of
the artist, the iconic content of the tattoo, the style in which the tattoo is executed,
etc.) and ideological qualities (the discourses that surround “artistic” tattoos,
discourses that point to some higher reality on which the tattoo is based).
Moreover, certain tattoos, like those that mimic the styles of Japan, Micronesia,
or Melanesia, are seen as paradigmatic—as the fine art tattoos against which
all others are compared, and which, in fact, define the genre for many Americans.
This transformation of meaning is only possible because of tattoo’s historic
position in western societies: as a stigmatized sign, traditionally used to mark
negative status (such as convict status), it has never occupied a regular role in
the West, thus its meanings have never been fixed, and are now more easily
changeable.