Our Bodies, Our Ink
Saira Hunjan
Among the first mainstream American celebrities to openly wear
tattoos was Janis Joplin.
On her left wrist, she had a Florentine bracelet. On her chest, she
wore a small heart — the size of a candy heart. “Just a little treat for
the boys,” she told Rolling Stone, “like icing on the cake.”
It seems like only yesterday that tattoos were rarities, like certain
crows. They were worth commenting upon, either for their beauty or their
banality. Now tattoos creep like vines along the arms, legs and torsos
of nearly everyone you meet. If print is dead, ink is undead — and on
the move.
There’s been some sophisticated fiction about skin and ink. I’m thinking especially of Sarah Hall’s novel
“Electric Michelangelo,”
a finalist for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. But it’s a lacunae in our
literature that there hasn’t been a definitive nonfiction book on the
topic, a volume that packs sociology and criticism and history and
memoir into a dense sleeve, as a tattoo artist might put it, of meaning.
While we await that book, we have Margot Mifflin’s perceptive and moving
“Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo,” first
published in 1997 but reissued now in a heavily updated and
resplendently illustrated third edition.
For most of history, tattooing has been a male preoccupation, either a
one-fingered salute or an exercise in swagger. Think of Popeye and his
twin anchors. Ms. Mifflin had the good idea to examine tattooing in the
Western world from a female perspective. Her relatively slim book
doesn’t provide a truly wide-angle view, but the insights she brings are
insinuating and complex.
This new edition of “Bodies of Subversion” arrives at the crest of a
wave. For the first time, according to a 2012 Harris Poll, American
women are more likely to be tattooed than men. Some 23 percent of women
have tattoos; 19 percent of men do. They’re no longer rebel emblems, Ms.
Mifflin notes. They’re a mainstream fashion choice.
She is mostly an admirer of women’s tattoo culture. Tattoos have been
“emblems of empowerment in an era of feminist gains,” she declares.
They’re also “badges of self-determination at a time when controversies
about abortion rights, date rape and sexual harassment” have made women
“think hard about who controls their bodies.”
Her book includes striking color photographs of the tattoos some women
have had embroidered on their chests after mastectomies. Thanks to
recent legislation, tattoo artists can sometimes directly bill insurance
companies for this work.
(If only Joplin had known that it would be possible to have your weed
and your tattoos covered by insurance, she might have decided to stick
around.)
But Ms. Mifflin is a flinty observer. She notes that tattoos have the
“ability to degrade as well as to enhance, to invoke the sacred and the
inane.” She assesses the work of social critics who posit that
tattooing can be a political cop-out, a cover for disengagement.
These critics argue, she writes, that “tattooing shifts the focus of
women’s issues from society to the self; that tattooed women are
empowered only in their minds; and that women who find solace in tattoos
are no different from women for whom shopping and exercise are
substitutes for problem-solving.” Ouch, as the client said to the
tattooist.
“Bodies of Subversion” is delicious social history. Tattooing was an
upper-class social fad in Europe in the late 19th century. Winston
Churchill’s mother had a tattoo of a snake eating its tail (the symbol
of eternity) on her wrist. The fad spread to America. In 1897, Ms.
Mifflin writes, The New York World estimated that 75 percent of American
society women were tattooed, usually in places easily covered by
clothing.
By the 1920s, tattooed women were mostly to be seen in freak shows and
in circus acts, where they could make more money than tattooed men. They
offered, the author avers, “a peep show within a freak show.”
Tattoos lost their appeal for nearly everyone shortly after World War
II. One reason was because “tattoos perpetrated in concentration camps
had added a ghastly new chapter to tattoo history.”
Ms. Mifflin’s story spins forward through the tattoo revival of the
1970s, when women with a tattoo or two began to shake the stigma that
they were sexually available. She moves attentively through the 1980s
and ’90s, the era that gave us Dennis Rodman, the lower-back tattoos now
known as
tramp stamps and a kudzu forest of copycat tribal tats.
Her final chapter takes us up to the present day, with assessments of the tattoo artist
Kat Von D’s
fame and of cultural moments like the popularity of Stieg Larsson’s
2005 novel “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Ms. Mifflin appraises the
work of famous female tattoists; she argues that the world needs tattoo
critics. I hereby nominate Tim Gunn and Lil Wayne as the genre’s Siskel
and Ebert.
She is at her best when considering class and tattoos. She quotes an
inked-up female doctor who says that it’s easier for professional women
to wear them at work: “If you’re working some crummy little desk job
with a dress code, it’s a lot harder to walk around wearing your tattoos
in the open.”
Ms. Mifflin deals, too, with the matter of tattoo regret. There’s plenty
of that going around. She cites a survey by the Archives of Dermatology
stating that 69 percent of tattoo removal requests come from women.
Most got stamped at the age of 20 or so. Quoting the same survey, she
says about tattoos, “Their marks of uniqueness ‘turned into stigmata.’ ”
But the Harris Poll cited above also noted that 86 percent of tattooed
people were content with their ink.
Those who would shame women with tattoos often utter things like: How
are those things going to look when you’re old and wrinkled? On the
basis of the photographs of older women with tattoos in this book, I’d
say they hold up pretty well.
In fact, I’d say they look sort of awesome.
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