Come here. No, closer. Let me prick you—not poke. I am not that needle which injects your flu shot or draws a vial of blood from the crook of your elbow. But I may steal some. Have it smeared on your skin. It’s up to you and your intoxication, you’re responsible for the amount you bleed—let’s hope you didn’t lie on that permission form sheet with your signature. To which do I owe this pleasure? A false identification and the need to rebel? A craving to be under the pinpricking, rhythmic needle? Peer pressure and insecurity? Liquid courage? Oh, never mind. It hardly matters.

Your body is my canvas, unappreciated by others—don’t worry, those idle judgments from yesterday have not caught up with the times, still living in the olden days, pre 1970s. I’d like to thank MTV and pro athletes for implying my permanent marks are cool. And for organizations, like the Alliance for Professional Tattooists, for cleaning up the industry, finally—finally!—realizing “safer practices protect the clients—and the tattooists.”¹ Thanks for saving my job but the help was uncalled for; I have been surviving in traditions and on outcasts for many years before the general public was willing to accept what I do, who I am.

Before entering jail cells, before parlors popping up on main street meant whorehouses next door²—irrational fear if you ask me—I was the sacred instrument to grant Dhegiha women “their proper place in the cosmology of their community.” I was fired from that honorable role by the mid 1950s.³ I simply couldn’t have the best of both worlds when mainstream, my sudden popularity, shot it—the private, quiet, treasured practice I performed for the Dhegiha—to hell and people suddenly began to seek out this form of expression.⁴ But I am fashion crazed, wanting nothing more than to please (except for the judgers—screw the judgers). And am entirely dependent on the needs of my artists and victims—that first bite from the needle always relinquishes a response, no matter how ready or willing one is, and I crave that intake of air, irregular heartbeat, or first bead of sweat. I am a machine, made of many-pointed needles holding the ink within my layers and puncturing the skin—what a lovely, lively canvas—so the ink can be drawn down,⁵ permanently marking, embedding itself in that smooth and enticing skin.

It’s this permanence they—the incessant and relentless judgers—can’t stand, the desecration of God’s perfect image forming my best canvases.⁶ In my mobility—the walking portraits of my artwork—I am greater than the brushes of Van Gogh or Picasso,⁷ for these “symbols of ownership by, devotion to, identification with, and protection by a deity or master can demonstrate the image of god.”⁸ My audience is greater. My persistence and prevalence over the years are slowly but surely wearing these horror-stricken Christians down. It helps that my creator, Samuel O ‘Reilly, modernized me back in 1891 when he invented the first electric tattoo machine; and certainly, Thomas Edison deserves my gratitude, for it was his embroidery machine that the invention was based on.⁹

Don’t deceive yourself into thinking I’m only a century old. When I was first born, I was mostly made of needles from bones. To the Polynesians who inhabited Hawaii, I was better known as kakau, guarding their health and spiritual well-being. My depictions of lizards, greatly respected and feared, and the Hawaiian crescent fan, to distinguish society’s highest-ranking members, were revered. Their bodies were further adorned with intricate tribal patterns and designs on the hands, fingers, wrists, and tongues for women; arms, legs, torsos, and face for men. I was only “a needle made from bone, tied to a stick and struck by a mallet” to apply pigment to the skin. After each use, I was destroyed. The secrecy of the practice was so highly guarded.¹⁰ (You didn’t hear it from me.) For the Inuit in the American Arctic, I was nothing more than eyed-bone needles and pigment-rubbed sinew stitched through their skin.¹¹ But it was the Tahitians who gave my work a name, derived from their tatau, “to mark.” First used by Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the French Navigator, in 1771 to describe my decorations on the body canvas. He translated my name to “tattoo.”¹²

Responsible for these markings, I am the identifier of lost sailors. In their fear of shipwrecks, I was called upon to ensure their Christian—yes, the irony!—burial. I was the badge for the prostitutes’ profession. For prisoners, I am the favored way to rebel against society and express their protests. Then there are the SS men—the bloody bastards!—who had me mark their blood group on the inside of their upper arms. My least favorite role, though, was playing slave to the Nazis, forced to permanently ink numbers on their victims’ arms.¹³ Keith Underwood may have clipped the cord, revolutionizing me into a battery-operated machine gun.¹⁴ What a terrible term. I despise the accuracy that negativity—“gun”—can convey. For the surviving Holocaust victims, I am the gun that triggers their memories with the worst artwork imaginable.

I told you I have existed much longer than the simple, cordless machine, as I am most commonly recognized. Since the Neolithic Period, some 5,300 years ago, I have been producing artwork on this earth.¹⁵ Please, don’t judge my age. My work has survived centuries. Didn’t you ever hear of the frozen corpse found trapped in a melting glacier in the Otztaler Alps back in 1991?¹⁶ No?! What do you mean No?! That’s a damned shame. I survive in the memories of Holocaust victims—in work I’d love to erase—but am neglected for traversing time and honoring traditions.

My popularity is no longer derived from tradition and honor, but rather controversy and personal experience. It’s the negative biases people have that I cannot forgive. I am harmless. Despite the nightmares the sight of my permanent mark may give Holocaust survivors. Or the cringe I receive from people who sought out my artwork in haste to showcase a love that didn’t last or an intoxicated decision they can’t remember. I do not discriminate. Soccer moms, veterans, athletes, rock stars, sailors, prostitutes, convicted felons. I have done them all. They do not deserve my rash judgment when I don’t know their stories. And I am worth much more than the harshness afforded me over decades by those who don’t know mine. But now you do.

 

Notes

1. Berkowitz, Bonnie, “Tattooing outgrows its renegade image to thrive in the mainstream,” The Washington Post, February 8, 2011, accessed November 1, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/07/AR2011020704915.html
2. Berkowitz.
3. Betsy Phillips, “Unearthing the Secrets of North America’s Tattooing Traditions,” Think Progress, March 2014, accessed November 1, 2015, http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/03/17/3410711/native-american-tattoos/
4. Phillips.
5. Rachel Feltman, “Watching a tattoo needle in slow motion reveals the physics of getting inked,” The Washington Post, September 24, 2014, accessed November 1, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/09/24/watching-a-tattoo-needle-in-slow-motion-reveals-the-physics-of-getting-inked/
6. Lorne Zelyck, “Under the Needle,” Christian Research Institute 28, no. 6 (2005). Accessed November 1, 2015, http://www.equip.org/article/under-the-needle/
7. Janet S. Fedorenko, Susan C. Sherlock, and Patricia L. Stuhr, “A Body of Work: a case study of tattoo culture,” Visual Arts Research 25, no. 1 (1999): 105-114. Accessed November 1, 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20715974
8. Zelyck.
9. Zelyck
10. “Skin Stories: the art and culture of Polynesian tattoo,” PBS, 2003, accessed November 1, 2015, http://www.pbs.org/skinstories/history/hawaii.html
11. Phillips.
12. Fedorenko et al, p. 105.
13. Fedorenko et al, p. 106.
14. Keith A. Underwood, 2003. Tattoo Technology. U.S. Patent US6550356B1, filed September 15, 2000, and issued April 22, 2003, accessed November 1, 2015, https://www-google-com.ezproxy.emich.edu/patents/US6550356
15. Fedorenko et al, p. 105.
16. Fedorenko et al, p. 105.