This is why women go inked: Feminism, tattoos and the new politics of body art

Heavily tattooed women struggle with gender norms, job discrimination, family unit rejection. Here'due south why they face it

By Beverly Yuen Thompson

Published September 12, 2015 8:00PM (EDT)

(PeopleImages via iStock)

Excerpted from "Covered in Ink: Tattoos, Women and the Politics of the Body"

Encountering the Globe of Tattooing

Earlier women are always exposed to the earth of alternative torso modification, they have been overexposed to the beauty culture through their personal interactions as well as the media. They take developed an identity based upon their gender performance, sexuality, race, nationality, age, and ability. With the addition of becoming heavily tattooed, their apotheosis identities intersect with these other factors. While White women may be given more space to experiment with their trunk modification, women of color, lesbians, disabled people, and other already-marked bodies will exist interpreted more harshly, as multiply "deviant." People of color's bodies are often criminalized and discriminated against; with the addition of heavy tattooing, these pressures tin can become magnified. Lesbians and bisexual women may face additional stigma if their tattooing reinforces a butch appearance, but less and so for a feminine 1.

To become heavily tattooed, one must get-go be exposed to the idea by seeing a tattooed private in the media or in her personal life. When interviewing participants, I asked them near this initial moment of exposure to the globe of tattooing. In Spokane, Washington, I met Sparkillicious, a xxx-one-yr-onetime mother of a toddler, a pupil, and a participant in Roller Derby (hence her use of her Roller Derby proper noun). Her breast-length brown and blond pilus cascaded over her shoulders, hiding the tattoos on her neck. She wore eye shadow, a lip ring, and a blackness tank acme that showed off the all-encompassing tattoo work on her arms and chest. A studded belt hinted to her punk rock, subcultural manner. For Sparkill-icious, the first heavily tattooed woman she saw was a family friend every bit a kid:

I was most five years old . . . and there was this adult female named Tattoo Julie. I remember this. This is my first memory of childhood. I'thou looking up at this lady and she is merely fully tattooed. Oh my God, I idea it was the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.

Every bit a friend of her mother's, Tattoo Julie brought the possibility of becoming tattooed into the realm of her family life. Subsequently on, when Sparkillicious began her own tattoo collection, it was her stepfather who start tattooed her. Later, she had these tattoos covered up with higher-quality work by another artist, which is referred to as a "cover-up tattoo." Since her family unit members were very much interested in alternative cultures, Sparkillicious was exposed early on on. Family unit influence is an extremely of import attribute in developing perspective on tattooing, just children practise not always follow their parents' perspective. Other women I talked with had parents who attempted to shield their children from the idea of tattooing, nevertheless it backfired. Such was the experience of the Florida tattooist Renee Trivial. While her mother attempted to shield her from the sight of a heavily tattooed woman when she was a child, Renee was similarly mesmerized:

I was five and information technology was the end of the eighties. I remember holding my mom's hand in the mall and seeing my kickoff punk rock chick. And she had a freakin' half-and-half mohawk thing. She had a tattoo of dates on her skull. She was awesome to me. I said, "Mom, what is that?" I remember my mom doing the whole earmuffs matter, and roofing my eyes. "Don't look." I'k only like, "That is crawly." [Later] my sister told me, "That's a tattoo." She was older; she knew all. Then that was my starting time sense of anything subcultural.

Though Renee'due south female parent showed disdain toward "deviant" female bodies and their possible effect on her young daughter, Renee was withal taken with the style. The paradigm stuck. Regardless of whether parents approve or disapprove of culling cocky-presentation, children will take their own detail tastes. The approval or non-approval from parents merely dictates how comfortable their child volition exist later on in sharing their culling appearance with their parents. Many of the participants expressed strong resonance with the first time they saw an alternative- looking person. Others came to their taste for body modifications subsequently on in life, in a less dramatic fashion.

Becoming a Heavily Tattooed Adult female

The participants in this report are "heavily tattooed," as opposed to "lightly tattooed." Simply having a tattoo is not gender transgressive. Tattoos are feminine so long as they are "small, cute and hidden," preferably located on a sexualized role of the torso. Equally we saw in the previous affiliate, when women began collecting tattoos in larger numbers during the 1970s and 1980s, these images were commonly e'er feminine—a small rose on the breast, a butterfly on the ankle, perhaps a small dolphin or sun. These tattoos were small, only a few inches in bore, and easily hidden, placed on the breast, shoulder, or hip. Tattoo shops had flash images on the wall "for the ladies," on which these small-scale designs lived. Janis Joplin had collected two tattoos from Lyle Tuttle starting in 1970, both of which were small and feminine. Her Florentine wrist bracelet tattoo was assuming for being so publicly visible, only it represented an ornate piece of jewelry, and to her information technology represented women's liberation. Additionally, she had a minor heart tattooed on her left breast, nearly which she stated, "I wanted some decoration. Run into, the i on my wrist is for everybody; the ane on my tit is for me and my friends." She paused and chuckled, "Just a little treat for the boys, like icing on the cake."

Her center tattoo was very much in line with women's tattooing of the solar day, but the wrist tattoo was one of the beginning publicly visible tattoos on a woman, and it was bold for the time. As a famous stone and gyre singer, she could get away with it. And her statement of the tattoo being "a little care for for the boys" demonstrates the sexual and feminine nature of a small, beautiful, hidden tattoo—or "icing on the cake" for a lover. Joplin's tattooist Lyle Tuttle, well-known as a celebrity tattooist, talked virtually how he enjoyed doing the small tattoos on women during our interview at the Spokane Tattoo Convention:

It was pocket-size collywobbles and rosebuds. I loved to put on small, colorful designs, so that was platonic for me. . . . And women are fun to tattoo. I mean, women will concur an intelligent chat with you. Guys desire to talk to yous nearly their god damned Harley Finkelberg, ya know. I'd rather scent perfumes than grease.

Kari Barba, another veteran tattooist from Southern California, recalled that earlier 1980, at that place were few female person clients, and they would but be in the marketplace for modest tattoos:

They are getting bigger stuff, for certain. It used to be merely a piffling quarter-size piece well-nigh of the fourth dimension. . . . And information technology used to be when I first started, perchance

10 percent of the clients were women. And now information technology is definitely l-fifty. In fact, sometimes I think nosotros definitely get more women.

Such nice tattoos are in stark dissimilarity to the heavy tattooing that the participants in this study boldly wear. While most inquiry on tattoos make their distinction between those individuals who take tattoos and those who do not, I mark the distinction betwixt women who are "lightly tattooed" and those that are "heavily tattooed." Every bit tattooing soars in popularity, information technology is non transgressive for women to have one, or even four, minor tattoos subconscious somewhere on their body, or perhaps even publicly visible, equally long equally it has at least ii of the iii categorizations in the mantra "small, cute, and hidden."

However, when women's tattoos become the reverse of "small, cute, and hidden"—"large, ugly, or public"—they begin to meet social sanctions for their ink. Encountering social sanctions and prejudice when their tattoos are visible is an indicator that one has become heavily tattooed and "crossed the line." For the heavily tattooed individual, beingness tattooed normally becomes important to their self-concept, and they become an "elite collector." As defined by Katherine Irwin,

The aristocracy collector . . . is a subset of heavily tattooed individuals who want the best fine art available, pay many thousands of dollars for their tattoos, and travel to cities effectually the U.s.a., Europe, Japan, or Commonwealth of australia to acquire pieces from famous artists.

In her study of elite tattoo collectors, Irwin describes a common aesthetic of tattoo imagery that the collectors often gravitate toward, as they are popular inside the subculture: "images of monsters, demons, beheadings, severed hands, and aliens." Christine Braunberger points out that once women get immersed in this subculture, they become "revolting bodies." Braunberger states, "As symbols demanding to be read, tattoos on women produce anxieties of misrecognition." Historically, heavily tattooed women were associated with the biker subculture, gangs, or prostitutes. Even in the 1970s, when tattooing was much more associated with the biker culture, women bikers still were steered toward "tattoos for the ladies," as many shops appear on a separate department of the flash art displays on the walls of the shop. All the same in the decades since so, women have moved away from the "tattoos for the ladies" sections and have begun to collect their ain imagery of monsters, which the public yet finds shocking on the female body. Because of this violation of gender norms, the women become monstrous in their violation and become the recipient of public scorn. The following sections look at mutual public reactions and cocky-defenses that heavily tattooed women meet, shaping the narrative of their tattooed identity.

"You're Such a Pretty Daughter, Why Would You lot Do That to Yourself?"

It is a lot more acceptable for men to have excessive corporeality of tattoos. I think it's normal for girls to have the lower dorsum or i on the shoulder. That seems to be accounted okay, only when y'all start getting into the full sleeves or the full bodies information technology's like, "Oh My God, you lot're such a pretty daughter, why would you practise that to yourself?" —Dawn Harris

The message that heavily tattooed women receive from the public is loud and clear: They are mutilating their bodies and making themselves ugly. Yet, in an interesting twist, the women reframe tattooing from their ain perspective—tattoos are beautiful, they are marks of individuality. Or else they resist the pressure for normative beauty—it's my body, my choice. In this quote higher up, Dawn Harris, a tattoo collector from Houston, Texas, expresses the negative social sanctions from the public that all of the women I interviewed study receiving. I interviewed Dawn during a visit to Webster, Texas, where shop director Jennifer Wilder connected me with quite a few women from her store Abstract Fine art, including customers, friends, and partners of the male person tattoo artists. At the fourth dimension, Dawn was twenty-eight-years-old and working at the Apple tree Store, where she was able to show her tattoos at work, although they elicited attention. In fact, she observed, "Pretty much everywhere yous get, especially around hither, [people notice]." Dawn is an attractive woman, with direct black hair cut in a rockabilly mode, directly bangs just in a higher place her eyebrows. She has ii old-school roses but below her collarbone and was already getting extensive piece of work on her arms, which extended from wrist to shoulder. On her left arm, she was getting a Japanese geisha zombie head touched up during i of our talks. I interviewed her every bit she got tattooed; she showed no reaction to the hurting she was receiving. This led the tattooist working on her to detect that "women sit down so much better than men." Tattooists and collectors alike, whom I encountered, made this observation. Dawn's arms were covered in medium-sized designs that were brought together with shading and background filler images to make the sleeves appear of a more solid ink design. Her images were "old-school," like those one would encounter on flash sheets in the front of a street store during the sailor years: nautical stars, a skull, a spider in a web. But her left arm was becoming covered in Japanese-style work, with ruby flowers and black h2o wave confined in the groundwork. For Dawn Harris and her friends, they believe their trunk fine art is beautiful; however, they know that many in the general public would beg to differ. To many observers, it is inconceivable that a woman would purposely make herself "ugly," and this disbelief compels many people to breach the lines of appropriate public self-presentation. Strangers often touch the tattooed person without warning and proceed to enquire questions such equally, "Are those real?"

Often tattoo artists warn customers confronting getting tattoos that they find highly visible or controversial. Before 1980, several of the women tattooists would warn women clients to avert large, bold tattoos because of such public, negative treatment. In his research on Chicana tattooing, Xuan Santos found that several Chicano tattooists in East Los Angeles oft "refused to tattoo Chicanas in areas of the body that are visible to the public eye . . . and encouraged women to tattoo on a private torso region." For the most part, women conform to feminine limitations. The tattoo collector Eileen Megias pointed out that many Cuban women in Miami keep their ink gender advisable, unlike herself:

They have the appropriate tattoos. There are tattoos that are acceptable if you're a Cuban daughter. Tattoos that are to heighten your sex entreatment, like the i on the lower dorsum, or on your hip, or possibly something small by your talocrural joint. They are in prescribed places and subject field matters, like a butterfly is okay. Your beau's name may exist strategically placed on your butt. That kind of thing. But definitely no large graphics, and definitely not a lot. Men have their manly tats that they are immune to have, no hibiscus for a Cuban man. Lot of names in script, or a memorial portrait of their baby, or dead brother, or a big 305 across their back. It'south e'er to maintain the line—what makes you an attractive man or an attractive woman. It's just incorrect to mess with those female assets; you're not supposed to ruin them.

In this quote, Eileen demonstrates the ways in which tattoo imagery reinforces normative gender roles, which are more restrictively reinforced in the Cuban culture that Eileen has experienced in her family and community. Imagery patterns are ofttimes established within subcultures, and for Latina/o, Black, and Native American women and men, script and memorials recognizing family members are common. She presents two gender-divergent tattoos designed for men (a big 305 on the back, which is the area code for Miami and represents hometown pride) and for women (flowers). Eileen Megias was a student of mine at Florida International University. While I was busy making sure all of my tattoos were tucked under my conform, I was grateful to walk into the classroom and see her sitting in the front row, with her assuming, blackness tribal tattoos covering a good per centum of her arms, visible in her short sleeve shirt. She had brusque pilus, was more masculine presenting in appearance, and had a big, bodacious smile on her face. She was older than some of the classmates, and her life experience was easily demonstrated in her confidence equally she spoke up in course, voicing well-thought-out opinions, and, of grade, in her ability to wait different from the mostly hyper-feminine Cuban women students in the classroom. Eileen was also a lesbian, and she brought her partner to my part one mean solar day to be interviewed, freely discussing their identities as heavily tattooed lesbian women in the gender-normative environs of Miami. Information technology was difficult for them, and they hoped to soon movement to a city that was "more tattoo friendly."

For women, part of becoming heavily tattooed is to negotiate this conclusion inside our beauty culture. In lodge to collect large, public, and so-chosen ugly tattoos, the women have to defend their choices on a daily ground. This is often a difficult position, fifty-fifty for the nigh confident. Greta Purcell, a participant from Spokane, Washington, describes this fear:

Women are agape of what people will think, extremely agape. Young girls are actually, really afraid of what people will recall. And then they go their tattoos really subconscious. Maybe somewhere where fifty-fifty their underwear would cover information technology. I just don't understand the shame.

Katherine Irwin agrees that women face boosted pressures when they become heavily tattooed because of the beauty culture norms. While men become more masculine with their extensive tattoo work, even invoking a hyper-masculine image that can be misconstrued equally criminal, women "are sometimes accused of being 'masculine,' 'ugly' or 'slutty.'" Many heavily tattooed women reclaimed their inked status as existence 1 of alternative dazzler. In her article "Beauty Secrets," the tattoo collector Lee Damsky describes this reclamation of "ugly" tattoos as a means of alternative beauty construction:

Afterward that year, I got a tattoo of Medusa on the back of my neck in an attempt to observe empowerment in ugliness. In Greek mythology, Medusa was a creature so ugly [destructively powerful] that anyone who looked at her was turned to stone. I thought that embracing this symbol of ugliness and inscribing it on my skin would be the first step in accepting my body and challenge it as my ain. Determined to abandon the cult of beauty once and for all, I resolved to be ugly and proud.

Many of the tattoos reverberate this sentiment past taking a portrait of a beautiful adult female, such as Marilyn Monroe, or a traditional pinup, and turning her into a zombie. Others collect images of cute Hollywood stars or pinups as a symbolic stand-in for the cute adult female with which they place.

Excerpted from "Covered In Ink: Tattoos, Women and the Politics of the Body" by Beverly Yuen Thompson. Published past New York University Press. Copyright 2015 by New York University. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Beverly Yuen Thompson

Beverly Yuen Thompson is associate professor of sociology at Siena College and the director of "Covered," an award-winning documentary on the globe of tattooed women

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