TATTOO

The tattooed in the western world today include many people from various walks of life: they are doctors and they are skateboarders, they are artists and teachers, punks and bus drivers, lawyers, leather daddies, convicts, mothers, fathers, grandparents, gang members, professors, students, street performers and bikers. Tattoos today seem to cross all boundaries, cultural, political and socio-economic. The act of tattooing, one of but many forms of intentional body modification, has been enveloped by the mainstream into the popular culture of the new millennium. Tattoos have become contemporary symbols of western identity and individualism.

As elements of mainstream, consumer culture, tattoos today have essentially become fashionable art. Those that tattoo are ‘tattoo artists;’ those that get tattooed bear ‘skin art.’ This has not always been the case. The introduction of tattoos into popular culture has been a very recent phenomenon. Tattoos were once the exclusive domain of sailors, bikers, convicts and punks, and were considered, through the eyes of the mainstream, a deviant behaviour, a low culture. In fact, tattoos for most of the twentieth century in North America existed solely at the subcultural level.

Captain James Cook encountered the Tahitian “ta-tu” when in the South Pacific in the 1760’s and brought tattoos back to England as curiosities. Tattoos took hold in late 19th century Europe and America as colonialist symbols of the exotic and primitive; of the cultural “other.” Tattoos entered the North American sphere as the “custom of criminals, sailors, prostitutes, manual labourers, and other disreputable types… a symbol of social marginality”

For most of the 20th century, tattoos remained relegated to military servicemen, the lower, working classes and their low culture. Tattoos “fragmented” in the 1960’s, however, and were used as important identity symbols for bikers, prison convicts, punks and the gay/leather subcultures of the American west coast. This fragmentation, the beginning of what was to become the “tattoo renaissance,” lead to the ultimate mainstreaming of tattoos as icons of popular culture in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Source

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