Tattoos and Popular Culture

Cultural Representations in Ink

Lee Barron

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839092176
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The rise of tattoos into the mainstream has been a defining aspect of 21st century western culture. Tattoos and Popular Culture showcases how tattoos have been catapulted from 'deviant' and 'alternative' subculture, into a popular culture, becoming a potent signifier of 'difference' for the Millennial generation.
From tattooed film superheroes such as Harley Quinn, MTV's Just Tattoo of Us, and the extensively tattooed and mediated bodies of celebrities across social media, tattoos are now not only inscribed into increasing numbers of Millennial and Gen Z bodies, but also into mainstream culture. As the entrenched stigmas associated with tattoos are eroded Barron asks, how do subcultural and mainstream tattoo images and practices co-exist? Which cultural expressions are at the forefront of modern tattoo culture?

1

Visible Ink: From Subculture to Mainstream Culture

Tattoo Beginnings

In her global survey of tattooing (encompassing) Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, the Oceanic Islands, the United States, Canada, Latin America and Europe, Anna Felicity Friedman establishes the global embeddedness of tattooing as both a historical and modern bodily practice. As she states of contemporary tattooing, ‘it exists in nearly every country on the skins of a phenomenal array of people. Perhaps at no other time in history has this art form been so prevalent, both in terms of its geographical reach and the sheer number of people who wear tattoos’ (2015, p. 9). Moreover, humans have been wearing tattoos for a long time as the practice is ‘a primal art form’ (Wroblewski, 1981, p. 9). In terms of social and cultural history, as Jane Caplan (2000) states, in addition to scarification and branding, tattooing is one of the oldest and globally diffused irreversible body modification practices. This was confirmed by the discovery of an extensively tattooed mummified body, (dating back to 3250 bce) ‘Ötzi’, the iceman, found beneath a glacier on the Austrian–Italian border, whose body sported 61 tattoo designs. The discovery of Ötzi was significant because it established not only that the practice of tattooing is an ancient art but also that tattoos, from their very beginning, have contained designs, communicative functions and values (Deter-Wolf, Robitaille, Krutak, & Galliot, 2015). As such, archaeological discoveries have stressed that tattoos were never merely ornamental, but were often inscribed for symbolic reasons and distinctively practical purposes, such as medicinal outcomes and curative practices in the form of therapeutic tattooing (Krutak, 2019).

With regard to ancient Egypt, Robert S. Bianchi explains that, while there were no explicit mentions of the practice of tattooing in their preserved histories, the ancient Egyptians practiced tattooing in the Middle Kingdom period, as revealed by excavated mummies. For example, the mummy of a woman named Amunet, who acted as a priestess for the goddess Hathor, displayed numerous tattoo designs consisting of abstract patterns of dots and dashes across her lower abdomen, thighs and arms. Furthermore, the practice in Egypt was itself an expression of cultural transmission and influence, as evidence stressed that the ‘Egyptian tattoo was imported from Nubia and developed during the course of the Middle Kingdom’ (1988, p. 24). In a more compelling set of discoveries, Renée Friedman et al. discuss the discoveries on two naturally mummified bodies, a male and female, held in the British Museum dating from Egypt's Predynastic Period, the era predating Egypt's unification by its first pharaoh in the period of 3100 bce. The male mummy displayed the tattooed images of two horned animals, while the female mummy revealed two S-shaped motifs likely to represent a sistrum (a ritual rattle), indicating that her tattoo designs were linked to ceremonial or ritual actions and ‘may have denoted status through magical empowerment or cult knowledge’ (2018, p. 121). The key significances of Friedman et al.'s research are that they confirm that tattooing is an ancient human cultural practice, but more significantly that humans consciously communicated via their body art and so utilized tattoos as a prehistoric form of visual language.

In his classic study of later global tattoo cultures, W.D. Hambly stressed that many indigenous cultures employed tattoos as distinctive signs of status, social/tribal identity, magical powers and personal therapeutic functions. For instance, in Hindu traditions, tattoos were worn in order to be recognized in the afterlife, whereas in the Antarctic, tattoos communicated signs of goodness following death. In terms of social position, Hambly stressed that the moko designs of the Maori warriors’ tattoo markings signified ‘a sign of prowess in battle and advanced social status’ (1925, p. 32). In this sense, given the geometrical ornateness of the work, and the intricacy of the tattooing procedure (all done by hand), Hambly considered moko as the apex of excellence in the ‘evolution of the fine art of body marking’ (1925, p. 262). While the Western subjective quality of Hambly's work has been questioned, in that his interpretations of the motivations underlying tribal tattoo practices was based upon his status as ‘an outsider looking in and providing for ritual actions that he cannot fully understand’ (Hardin, 1999, p. 86), the symbolic nature of such practices has been further recognized.

From a sociological perspective, Bryan S. Turner (1991) examined the ‘premodern’ body as a site for the bodily display of a number of primary social factors and biographical moments in which social status was marked into the body via acts of scarification and tattooing. In this context, tattoos have been obtained due to the belief that they possess powerful healing powers (Connor, 2004); tattoos have acted as distinctive cultural markers, from serving as religious signifiers to confirm pilgrimages or be imposed as publicly visible and permanent signs of punishment for criminals (Huang, 2016). With regard to social ‘functions’, tattoos have been used by tribal groups to mark individuals ‘as members of a greater community’ (Hemingson, 2009, p. 9) and have acted as marks to indicate acts of bravery (Bitarello & Queiroz, 2014) and permanent symbolic markers in rites of passage (Benson, 2000). However, as Peter Gathercole argues, the wearing of elaborate facial tattoos within Maori culture did tend to be located within the high-born members of groups and so indicative of social status. However, the issue of personal choice was also a factor regarding the wearing of moko in that while some designs may have reflected distinctive tribal relationships, ‘it was certainly the case that individuals regarded their own moko as particular to themselves’ (1988, p. 172).

Tattoo Influences and Cultural Markers

This dynamic between tattoos representing viable bodily signs of group membership and individual bodily choices and self-representation is a factor that has become central to exploring the development and cultural proliferation of tattooing. Moreover, both of these factors exhibiting what Steven Connor argues are key elements of the practice of tattooing, within both an historical and contemporary sense, that the tattoo ‘turns the vulnerability of the body, its exposure to penetration, into a flaunted surface’ (2004, p. 63).

With regard to the proliferation of tattooing within the Western world, the ‘standard’ historical account centred on the influence of the ‘flaunted surfaces’ of the tattooed bodies of the sailors on the voyages of Captain Cook to Tahiti between in the late-1760s and the early to mid-1770s. As Cook reflected within his journal in July 1769 of the people of Tahiti, ‘Both sexes paint their bodies, Tattow as it is called in their language, this is done by inlaying the colour of black under their skins in such a manner as to be indelible’ (in Thévoz, 1984, pp. 39–40). A number of Cook's sailors and officers obtained similar tattoos to commemorate their experiences, displaying them on their return, and the effect was intensified by the bringing to England of the heavily tattooed Tahitian, Omai, whose ‘appearance sparked a tattooing vogue among the English aristocracy’ (Fleming, 2000, p. 67). In this way, tattooing became a more visible bodily practice within British, and subsequently wider European culture. However, while certainly an element of the development of tattooing in the West, art historians such as Matt Lodder (2015) have stressed that the idea that tattoos were ‘rediscovered’ via the voyages of Captain Cook is an overstatement. Indeed, the idea that sailors needed to be introduced to the practice of tattooing overlooks the extensive tattooing cultures that eighteenth century seafarers already possessed, a practice that did not rely on copying Tahitian designs and bringing them back to Western ports.

Similarly, as Juliet Fleming states in her study of Renaissance tattoo culture, prior to the Tahitian-derived term, there were numerous alternative English words for the practice preceding the mid-eighteenth century, such as ‘listing’, ‘rasing’, ‘pricking’ and ‘pouncing’. A key element in the early history of tattooing was the issue of religious condemnation of the practice of tattooing. As Fleming argues, the source of this religious prohibition was classically related to the line in Leviticus (19: 28), which commands ‘You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you’. Yet, in the New Testament, and Paul's Letter to the Galatians, the wearing of tattoos, if dedicated to Jesus, was an acceptable Christian practice. In this context, the wearing of religious tattoos did become a key aspect of expressing commitment to the Christian faith within the Medieval period, and pilgrims to Jerusalem would return with evidence that they had made the journey to the Holy Land. For example, as Hambly (1925) notes, Armenian Christians making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem would tattoo themselves with the date of their journey, in addition to their name or initials, and the Copts wore tattoos consisting of three lines or dots to represent the Holy Trinity (Tassie, 2003). As such, argues Fleming, throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth and 17th centuries, pilgrims wore tattoos that consisted of names such as Jesus, Mary, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem and symbols such as the Jerusalem Cross. Likewise, even though the Reformation ostensibly represented the end of the practice of pilgrimage, many worshippers from Protestant countries continued to make such journeys, and the majority received commemorative tattoos, ‘either at the site of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, or in Bethlehem, which seems to have been something of a tattoo centre’ (2000, p. 79). Therefore, the practice of tattooing was not exclusively related to the experience, body designs and modifications of Captain Cook's sailors.

Tattoo Evolutions: Spectacle, Rebellion, Subculture

In Tattooed: The Sociogenesis of a Body Art, Michael Atkinson presents a distinctive categorization of the differing periods of Western tattoo history. The first significant period in this history was that late eighteenth-to-mid-nineteenth century period in which sailors exposed to indigenous tattooing practices (and navy-based tattoo cultures), returned home ‘with cultural artefacts inscribed upon their bodies, [and so] tattoos began sneaking into mainstream European, and eventually North American figurations’ (2003, p. 33). However, following this period, tattooing became aligned with social spectacle, or what Atkinson refers to as the Carnival Era (1880s–1920s), as many heavily tattooed sailors found work with carnivals and circuses. This development additionally drove the increased demand for professional tattooists, such as Milton Hildebrandt, Tom Riley, Bert Grimm and Charlie Wagner, a development intensified by the invention of the electric tattoo machine by Samuel O'Reilly in 1891. Additionally, this display of tattooed bodies effectively represented tattoos, as Stephan Oettermann argues, as forms of public entertainment and spectacle. Indeed, one such performer, Anelta Nerona, combined key elements of tattooed spectacle with entertainment in that she was ‘tattooed with celebrities such as Goethe, Schiller, Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Richard Wagner’ (2000, p. 207). Therefore, the links between tattooing and forms of media-style distraction have an extensive history. However, as the Carnival Era waned the interrelated subsequent periods in tattooing history, the Working-class Era (1920s–1950s) and the Rebel Era (1950–1970) gave tattooing a distinctive class and cultural set of perspectives.

In a British context, in his classic study of nineteenth-century working-class labour patterns and the lives of the poor in London, Henry Mayhew identified tattooing as a distinctive working-class activity. As he noted in this regard, young men took ‘delight in tattooing their chests and arms with anchors and figures of different kinds’ (2006, p. 20), in addition to bearing the pain without flinching to impress peers. Aside from a brief aristocratic ‘craze’ for tattooing at the end of the nineteenth century (Bradley, 2000), as Atkinson argues, tattoos in North American cities (and in other part of the world) became increasingly associated with working-class life and culture. A primary reason for this was because tattoo parlours were predominantly located in ‘districts of the city characterized by poverty and crime’ (2003, p. 36). In this period, the aesthetics of the tattoo shop as a space adorned with walls of predesigned flash art was established, and, within an American context at least, the tattooing style known as ‘Traditional’ was established, comprising of cartoon characters, pinups, skulls, daggers, eagles, snakes, tigers and flags. Hence, the Working-class Era was significant in terms of the proliferation of tattooing, but at its heart was an intrinsic quality of ‘disrepute’, the practice of ‘tattoo fans’ that Albert Parry, in Tattoo: Secrets of a Strange Art (published in 1933), described as the ‘slum-dwellers, toughs, sailors, and other plebs’ (2006, p. 92). Such associations of tattoos with disreputability would see the Working-class Era segue into the Rebel Era (1950––1970) in which tattoos took on symbolic values as signs of group membership, but, more importantly, permanent markers of dissatisfaction with, and frequently rejection of, wider social and cultural ‘respectable’ norms and values. As such, tattoos were considered by sections of society to represent distinctively threatening values.

As Atkinson explains, following the Second World War, tattooing took on a pronounced aura of disreputability due to their association with specific nonconformist enclaves. Hence,

As social groups brandished tattoos to advertise their collective discontent with society, the practice became popular among members of the social underbelly. Firmly entrenching cultural associations between tattoos and the fringe element in society, a full spectrum of social deviants adopted tattooing as a method of permanently expressing a politically charged disaffection with their cultural surroundings.

(2003, p. 38)

In this sense, tattoos became signs of street and motorcycle gang affiliations, whose visible tattoos marked them off from wider society and consciously signified rebellion against the established order. Moreover, media representations of such groups reinforced and culturally disseminated this perception, to inculcate within social actors the view that the wearing of tattoos automatically signified a criminal disposition on the part of the wearer. The result was, argues Atkinson, that in ‘the public eye, tattoos were (once again) the uncontested marker of the criminal, the outsider, the social miscreant’ (2003, p. 41). This idea of tattoos having an intrinsic connection with marginal, deviant or criminal groups was the central theme of the tattooist/academic Samuel Steward, whose classic book, Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo with Gangs, Sailors, and Street-Corner Punks, 1950–1965, centrally covered the key span of the Rebel Era.

For Steward, reflecting from his dealings with tattoo clients, he proffered a range of motivations for people to be tattooed. These reasons ranged from the desire merely for bodily decoration, a body-focused narcissism (driven by the belief, often regretted, that tattoos would enhance physical beauty), the longing for exhibitionism, sadomasochism, the imitation of other tattooed social actors and addictive compulsion, where one tattoo leads to the persistent desire for more. In other instances, tattoos were sought to communicate sentimental messages (the names of mothers), Christian religious affiliations (tattoos of Christ on the cross, crowns of thorns or bleeding hearts) and expressions of patriotism or ethnic identities. Unsurprisingly, some clients undertook the process of tattooing in order to wear and display visible bodily signs of nonconformity and rebellion, tattoos that, in Steward's view, represented signs of antisocial ‘rebels without a cause’ or ‘inarticulate revolt’ (1990, p. 65). In this context, tattoos were significant markers of gang affiliation, serving to communicate a sense of toughness in enduring the tattooing process as well as signifying their membership of a particular gang by permitting ‘their insignia to be engraved in their skin’ (Schiffmacher, 2005, p. 11). However, a further element within the apparent Rebel Era was that tattoos became distinctive in that the use of tattoos as markers of rebellion, or at least as visible bodily signs of the desire to separate from wider culture, notably occurred. As Atkinson argues, in addition to tattoos being worn as part of a separation from ‘respectable society’, this practice also became increasingly prevalent from the 1950s onwards in a number of youth subcultures, such as the Rockers, the Modernists (Mods), the Greasers and the Rockabilly movement. In Atkinson's view, these youth groups added tattoos to their repertories of cultural artifacts (distinctive styles of dress and music) to engage in a countercultural rebellion against dominant social values, and middle-class bodily expectations and physical representations. In this context, therefore, the subcultural act of tattooing directly (and permanently) served to disrupt or outrage dominant middle-class ‘cultural understandings of corporeality’ (2003, p. 41) and bodily representation. The link between subcultures and tattooing is a significant one, in that other subcultures such as the Teddy Boys, Hippies and Punks also actively popularized tattooing as an increasing social practice throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, in tandem with employing tattoos ‘as a language of defiance against prevalent social norms’ (Camphausen, 1997, p. 11).

For Ken Gelder, youth subcultures have habitually been read as ‘nonconformist and non-normative: different, dissenting, or (to use a term sometimes applied to subcultures by others) “deviant”’ (2007, p. 3)’. In terms of the classic articulations of subcultures, the interrelationship of a distinctive class attitude and the adoption of particular styles of dress and bodily comportment traditionally lies at the heart of subcultural studies. This was so because, as John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson and Brian Roberts, the key members of the foundational Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), argue within Resistance Through Rituals (originally published in 1976), subcultures ‘must exhibit a distinctive enough shape and structure to make them identifiably different from their “parent” culture’ (2006, p. 7). While the CCCS approach consisted of numerous academics and conceptual approaches, it broadly coalesced around issues of class, as informed by the neo-Marxist perspectives of Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci. A key example of this approach was Phil Cohen's analysis of the ways in which working-class groups responded to postwar British class transformations, the erosion of skilled labour into routine work, unemployment and spatial dislocations caused by the redevelopment of traditional working-class housing areas. In this context, the actions of distinctive youth groups served to counter these social incursions and erosion of life chances and opportunities. In this sense, subcultures, drawing upon distinctive aspects of culture, most notably fashion and popular music, were formed as a means of establishing some form of self-directed control in the face of these seemingly all-pervasive social forces. An important issue within these practices is that they operated only in a microsocial context and that they served as ‘imaginary’ solutions to problems that were ultimately beyond their control and so engaged in acts of ‘self-liberation’:

Thus the ‘Teddy Boy’ expropriation of an upper class style of dress ‘covers’ the gap between largely manual, unskilled, near-lumpen real careers and life chances, and the ‘all-dressed-up-and-nowhere-to-go’ experience of Saturday evening. Thus, in the expropriation and fetishisation of consumption and style itself, the ‘Mods’ cover for the gap between the never-ending-weekend and Monday's resumption of boring, dead-end work’.

(Clarke, Hall, Jefferson, & Roberts, 2006, p. 37)

As Bill Osgerby argues, in addition to the class conf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Visible Ink: From Subculture to Mainstream Culture
• 2. Tattoos in Film
• 3. Tattooing and Reality TV
• 4. Social Media and Digital Tattoo Communities
• 5. Tattoos and Popular Personalities: Inked Celebrities
• Conclusion
• Bibliography