11

Inkside out

Then I’m gonna get this tattoo/Changed to another girl’s name

The Cruel Sea, ‘The Honeymoon is Over’

‘I got a Tube to Hoxton, to a place I’d gone to a year before when Ingrid had decided to get her sons’ names tattooed on the inside of her wrist by a man she found on Instagram. She said he had 100,000 followers.’

Martha, the witty protagonist of Meg Mason’s novel Sorrow and Bliss, is about to get her first tattoo. (Key background information is that Ingrid is her sister and Hoxton is to London what Williamsburg is to Brooklyn, what Newtown is to Sydney or Brunswick is to Melbourne.) Martha shows the tattooist a picture on her phone.

I said, ‘Not coloured in. Just the outline of it. As small as possible.’

He took the phone and made the picture bigger. ‘What is it?’

I told him it was a barometric map of the Hebrides. I wanted it on my hand, I didn’t care where.

The tattooist recommends just below the thumbnail, and asks Martha if she wants this atmospheric tattoo because she comes from the remote Scottish coast. She doesn’t, and at first she’s not sure whether to share the real reason with him but decides the time has come to own her story.

‘The weather there is generally just cyclones and torrential storms and hurricanes that are unpredictable and devastating which, I assume, makes it hard to live a normal life. It’s how I feel. I have ——’

He swivelled, and tossed the cotton in a bin and said, ‘Who doesn’t, love?’¹

When Martha arrives home, she holds her cling-wrapped thumb up to show her husband, Patrick. The tattoo underneath, she explains, is a metaphor for her mental state, which has just been diagnosed by her psychiatrist as ——. (What a relief that Mason never fills in the blank, so readers can’t pathologise the wonderfully acerbic character she has created.) Patrick, who happens to be a doctor, seems uninterested. Shockingly, he tells his wife he already knows about her mental-health diagnosis. Things get ugly, but really it’s just sad.

Martha’s tattoo is the least of this brilliant and funny novel, but permanent ink struck me as perfect self-expression for someone struggling to understand herself and make herself understood. Martha knows her diagnosis won’t shift the prevailing climatic conditions from stormy to temperate, but her tattoo makes a permanent external chart of the pressures inside. The trifecta of women, tattoos and illness was, I also realised, quite zeitgeisty.

A decade before Sorrow and Bliss, Fiona McGregor published her bestselling novel Indelible Ink, a narrative that is driven by the urge to tattoo. Set during a parched Sydney summer, the book’s visceral descriptions of the raw experience of being tattooed play out against a backdrop of family, illness and real estate, the city’s one true faith. In 2010, it was credible that the grown-up children, posh friends and wealthy neighbours of the novel’s protagonist, Marie, ‘fifty-nine, divorced, with money in her wallet’, would be scandalised by her big, fresh tattoos. For Marie, her tattoos symbolise freedom and endurance. Exposing herself to the tattoo gun floods her with an addictive energy. The vibrating, inked needle being pushed down into her dermis hurts, but has an upside: the pain’s release of adrenaline and endorphins.

As a first timer in an entry-level tattoo parlour, Marie selects a prosaic rose for her shoulder blade. Before long she visits another tattoo studio and breaks out into bolder, more artful designs: an ankle-band of jasmine, flames on her stomach, a splendid ghost moth on her back and maroon, purple and orange passionflowers for her hands. Inner-city single mother Rhys, the first lesbian Marie is aware of meeting, becomes her tattooist and confidant. She wants more, but fate intervenes. McGregor writes beautifully about Marie’s complicated relationship with her epidermis and why tattoos offer freedom. ‘She had never liked her skin: she lived inside it like a captive. Imported, unsuitable, over-reactive, it kept no secrets. Everything transmitted: spicy meals, tears, anxiety, another long day in the garden. Every ultraviolet hour of her life was written across it, every drink taken. Yet now, finally, here was a mark she had chosen. She had planted her own flag in her own country.’²

Today, residents of Mosman, the harbourside suburb where the novel mainly takes place, would hardly bat a surgically lifted eyelid at someone with tattoos. Marie’s children would likely be tattooed themselves, somewhere discreet. The landscape of skin we see all around us has changed in the past decade. The view is now inked. Around a third of 25- to 39-year-olds in the UK, the US and Australia have at least one tattoo. One survey from the US said that nearly half of millennials – those born between 1982 and 2004 – had one or more.³ In 2015, 40 per cent of Americans lived in a house where someone had a tattoo.⁴ Stigma lingers, depending on where and what the tattoo is, but inked skin is no longer the dress code for entry into underground subcultures. Tattoos are mainstream.

Popular culture is a good way to track this rise. Tattoos on screen – like blushing in Victorian novels – make superb narrative devices. In Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film Memento, Guy Pearce plays an amnesiac called Leonard. Like a fish swimming around a bowl, his short-term memory has a time limit, and he cannot form new memories. The film’s conceit is that Polaroid pictures and the tattoos that cover Leonard’s lean body are mnemonics. Leonard is a walking to-do list, the task of avenging his wife’s death the main task of each day. The biggest tattoo, unmissable, on this human Rosetta Stone of ink and flesh is a simple command running across his chest: Find him and kill him. For most filmmakers, memory loss would be sufficient plot device, but Memento ups the level of difficulty through chronology and flashback: it runs backwards in time in colour, and forwards in black and white, with the two timelines interspersed. Viewers hardly dare blink in case they lose track of significant plot points. The film’s tense and menacing mood, and a few key revelations, lead viewers to suspect that Leonard’s tattoos might not mean what they say.

David Fincher’s Fight Club, another bare-chested film about male alienation that is saturated with a striking aesthetic, was released a few years before. Slogans from the film – DO NOT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB, YOU ARE NOT YOUR JOB – inscribe the arms of many men in the twenty-first century. Instagram is full of Fight Club fan tattoos that, with all respect, seem to confuse anti-capitalism for nihilism. Inked iterations of Brad Pitt poised to throw a punch, or Helena Bonham Carter wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette, would indicate that the film is more popular now than it was when it was released, having acquired cult status. I watched Fight Club on the hunt for tattoos. Guess what? Only a single random extra in this edgy, misunderstood movie (which, though it may be, I never want to watch again) has a tattoo. I had to press pause to see it.

If you saw Memento or Fight Club in a cinema at the pre-Instagram, pre-smartphone turn of the century, chances are your ticket seller, popcorn vendor, fellow movie-goers and perhaps you yourself had un-inked skin. Now, you might be more inclined to notice twenty-somethings in the box office or behind the bar without tattoos. The sixth and final season of Sex and the City aired in 2004. New Yorkers Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha – who exposed everything – did not reveal any tattoos. A decade or so later, three of the four eponymous Girls of Lena Dunham’s show, also set in New York City, had tattoos. (If SATC had been made today, Samantha and Miranda would have tattoos, Charlotte would not, and Carrie wouldn’t be able to decide. Discuss.) The iconic celebrity tattoos of the 1990s – Johnny Depp’s Winona Forever, Angelina Jolie’s Billy Bob and Pamela Anderson’s barbed wire – were newsworthy at the time. Keeping up with celebrity and influencer tattoos now would require full-time tattoo correspondents, but such a role would be redundant thanks to Instagram, and stars that fade as quickly as they rise. Tattoos existed thousands of years before Instagram launched in 2010, but now the two are co-dependent.

In 2020 I spoke via Zoom with Brisbane psychologist and researcher Stephanie Bonson, who is writing a PhD on body modification, in what turned out to be one of the most memorable video calls I had that year. It wasn’t her blue hair that struck me; it was her pet snake, coiled around her neck and shoulders while we talked. (Our conversation did not digress into snakeskin, but so easily could have: imagine if we humans shed our skin in one go, like reptiles?) Bonson shared an article with me called ‘Revolting bodies: The monster beauty of tattooed women’ by Dr Christine Braunberger. At first it seemed almost quaint to read Braunberger’s quote from a woman describing her boyfriend’s reaction to the intricate tattoos on her shoulders: ‘He said they make him think of prostitutes and biker chicks. I’ve never even been on a motorcycle. So I said, “but this is me. You know me.” But he says he needs time to get over the connection.’⁵

A tattoo made a bigger statement in 2000, when this article was published, and provoked greater unease than it would now. Sydney tattoo artist Megan Oliver says, ‘There have always been tattoo enthusiasts. In the old days it used to be a bit like having a walk on the wild side. Tattoo magazines and reality television blew that out of the water because, all of a sudden, tattooing was in Mr and Mrs Average-Joe’s living room. It became more accessible. And Instagram made a massive difference.’ Young people unaware of tattooing’s ‘wild side’ history might be surprised to learn of its previous associations with gang members, sailors, jailbirds and circus sideshows. But as much as tattoos blur boundaries, like everything else, they remain gendered.

Braunberger argues that women’s tattoos tell different stories. ‘Masculine tattoo connotations – brave, heroic, macho – slip off the skin of women.’ Tattoos are a classic signifier of villainy – think of the psychopathic Max Cady in Cape Fear – but ink on men is just as likely to suggest virile masculinity, gay or straight. The original Marlboro Man had tattoos – first an anchor and then an eagle, both on the hand – all the better for smoking with. Women have less control over how their tattoos are seen, should they choose to reveal them. Women’s tattoos may be read as personal, transgressive or lascivious. A woman with a lower-back tattoo, for example, might prefer that it not be known as a ‘tramp stamp’, but the male gaze may remove that choice.

Tattoos are everywhere, on skins of all tones, genders and classes. Models on fashion runways, male and female sports stars, CEOs, politicians (famously, Justin Trudeau), soccer moms, construction workers, students, gym instructors, yogis, surfers, musicians and insurgents and protesters. Our tattoos are as diverse as we are. As a mini summer experiment, I started looking for baristas, bartenders, waiters and fellow swimmers with un-inked skin. It was an exercise in futility and I gave up after a few days. Tattoos are in vogue, but fashion is cyclical: tomorrow, might tattoos be seen as so yesterday? Probably not, because a critical mass of permanent ink on the skin of millions of bodies surely guarantees ongoing fashionability. In the twenty-first century, tattooing is standard adornment, a mode of expression powered by Instagram, where tattooists to the stars become stars themselves.

Los Angeles tattoo artist Brian Woo – Dr Woo, as he is known – has almost two million Instagram followers. He is renowned for his fine-lined geometries of circles, arrows and dots, as well as bespoke roses, elephants, origami cranes, snakes, mandalas, cherubs, dragonflies, Miley Cyrus’s Vegemite jar (in homage to her then-beau, Liam Hemsworth), Ruby Rose’s White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, and tributes to artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Woo does black and grey, single-needled tattoos in his studio, the Hideaway at Suite X, which is exactly what I’d call my shop if I sought popularity and exclusivity. Overrun with demand, he only needs to open a short window for email bookings every few months.⁶

Woo is likely too professional to inscribe words on skin that add to the annals of tattooed spellcheck fails. Permanent misspellings in English and poorly reproduced Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese or Japanese characters abound. As do out-of-context quotes that presumably carry meaning for the wearer. What would Samuel Beckett make of twenty-somethings partying hard, waving arms adorned with ‘Fail Again, Fail Better’ in the air like they just don’t care? The message to be taken from people booking expensive and painful laser-removal appointments to erase tributes to their exes is that inking a lover’s name permanently on your skin is a bad idea.

Would my dad, who routinely called his children by the wrong names, have been aided by a tattoo listing the birth order of the four of us? I doubt it. Much as I love people’s tattoos of their family’s names, they always remind me of this Jerry Seinfeld stand-up routine: ‘Why do people who work in offices have pictures of their family on their desk facing them? Do they forget that they’re married? Do they go, “All right, five o’clock. Time to hit the bars and pick up some hookers. Hold it a second, I got a wife and three kids. I better get home. I completely forgot.”’⁷ (Then again, the only tattoo I’ve ever considered getting was the name of our lost son, but I realised I didn’t want to explain who Daniel was when strangers asked. I wrote a book to explain that instead.)

Tattoos aren’t new, but their present ubiquity and bespoke designs are very twenty-first century. Throughout history, deliberate body markings have declared patriotism, love, religious belief, high status, incarceration or enslavement. Tattooing may also have been therapeutic. ‘Ötzi’, the much-studied late-Neolithic iceman extracted in a perfect state from a glacier on the Italian–Austrian border in 1991, had sixty-one tattoos, made by rubbing charcoal into punctured skin. Not only cosmetic and cultural, researchers traced acupuncture points and concluded that because of Ötzi’s arthritis, his tattoos were probably medicinal, too.⁸ Tattooing was an exclusively female practice in Ancient Egypt where an inked mark became a protective amulet for pregnancy and birth. Nubians, ancient Britons and indigenous North and South Americans all practised tattooing. The Celts apparently did not, which makes the present-day popularity of tattooed Celtic knots and crosses amusing. One writer unfairly but hilariously called them ‘the lite rock station’ of tattoos.⁹

Polynesian tattoos, with their deep roots in history and culture, are the opposite of insubstantial, mass-produced, ‘lite rock’ tattoos. British explorer and navigator James Cook’s 1769 expedition to Tahiti and across the Pacific foreshadowed the British colonisation that would beset nearly every place he visited. More immediately, his trip gifted the English language the word ‘tattoo’, from the Tahitian ‘tatatou’, which means to hit or strike. The art and writing that Cook’s trip inspired, including the journals of botanist Joseph Banks, made tattoos more visible and exotic in Europe. Cultural tattooing may have been repressed by colonisers and missionaries across the Pacific into the twentieth century, but these meaning-laden marks never vanished. Now they are being reclaimed.

Aotearoa New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Nanaia Mahuta is not only the world’s first indigenous foreign minister, she was also the first woman to wear moko kauae, a woman’s facial tattoo, on the floor of the New Zealand parliament. The moko (face tattoo) is a potent symbol of Māori identity. It marks and celebrates a person’s social standing and genealogy. Mahuta spoke movingly about her tattoo on an episode of the podcast Stuff the British Stole called ‘The Headhunters’, which, horrifyingly, is about Mokomokai, the tattooed heads that became collectors’ items in the United Kingdom.¹⁰

Mahuta says getting her moko kauae marked the milestones of her twentieth year as a Labour politician in the Aotearoa New Zealand parliament, and ten years since the passing of her father. As a personified symbol of the revitalisation of Māori culture on the world stage, her moko transcends the personal. Mahuta had her chin and lips tattooed alongside fourteen of her relatives who had discussed what the moko meant – and what it would mean for them in the wider world – for six months. The declamatory power of this collective act was such that Mahuta reflected, ‘On the day, it felt like being reborn, or reconnected to things you always had within you . . . it was manifested once you saw this lifetime marking on your face and what it represents. You feel different.’ She says, ‘I’m probably more me than I’ve ever been . . . It was like bringing the inside out.’

Few tattoos can be as sacred as those that draw on deep cultural lineage; Māori, Samoan, Tahitian and Hawaiian bodies can be canvases for stories stretching back in time. Most Western tattoos lie somewhere on the spectrum between Mahuta’s profound act of Māori repossession, and a tattoo chosen drunkenly from a tattooist’s ‘flash’, the sheets of designs pasted on parlour walls or in binders, at the end of a big night out. Tattoos can carry unique meaning, coopting an expanse of skin to communicate something otherwise unsayable. Bringing the inside out for public display, or not. Six tattooed women told me about theirs.

Monica Dux is laughing her head off as she assures me that her tattoo does not fall into the deep and meaningful category. I talked to Dux, a Melbourne writer, after she posted an arty portrait of herself, taken decades ago. As well as exposing the psoriasis on the skin of her younger self, the photo revealed a big tattoo on her arm. (I felt as if I was looking at a living Venn diagram of this book’s concerns.) Dux tells me, ‘I got my tattoo when I was twenty or twenty-one. Everyone was doing all those terrible Celtic designs at the time, around 1995. Or it was all Sanskrit, or Japanese characters. Or butterflies. I thought, “Fuck that, what’s funny?” Three black oblongs on my arm! I thought it would be funny to get something on my body that had no point, so when people asked me what it was, I’d say, “It’s three black oblongs.” Now I think, “God, you’ve got to be really young because it’s not funny, is it?”’ I’m sincere when I tell Monica that actually, I think it is. I had assumed her tattoo must have been an earnest homage to the obelisks from 2001: A Space Odyssey. For me, three black oblongs that mean nothing is a punchline thirty years in the making.

Her tattoo may not mark a revolutionary feminist aesthetic, but the reason Dux got it is no joke. ‘In a nutshell, I hated the way I was treated as a girl. I felt extremely restricted as a child in the 1970s and 80s because I was a girl. I didn’t fit into the world I was growing up in.’ Dux started to push back at university. ‘I had long blonde hair. I hated it. I got to uni and of course I shaved my head and felt really powerful. Back in the 90s, it was all intersecting with sexuality. I read a lot of Judith Butler at uni. [Butler, philosopher and gender theorist, helped the world to see it could be genderqueer.] It was very much about what it was to be a woman, how my femininity was understood. I remember thinking it’s not about sexuality; this is how I feel about what I’ve been told it is to be a girl. Being a young woman, you’re constantly sexually harassed, borderline raped. It’s awful. I worked in a supermarket for years and the whole world angered me because I felt like I had no control over my body and how it was seen. Suddenly, I was able to throw it all back.

‘Piercing became kind of cool. I had everything pierced – my lip, my tongue, everywhere. It was a way of trying to mark myself. It was a bit extreme, a kind of barrier. But I didn’t see it as a negative thing – it gave me a sense of claiming my own body. I’d thought it through a lot. I mean, there is a fine line between self-mutilating and decorating.’ Piercings and tattoos form a natural pair, ‘So of course I wanted a tattoo. I lived in a Newtown share house and everyone was like, “Let’s go get a tattoo!” So, we drove to a tattoo parlour in Kings Cross. It was kind of scary, but cool. Hardcore. Ten years later, in my thirties, I thought, “What a waste of time!” I’d go to screenwriting events and awards nights’ – Dux’s partner is a screenwriter – ‘and people would go, “Oooh, what does that tattoo mean?” And I’d be like, “It means nothing, it’s just three black oblongs!”

‘I thought about getting it removed but ended up thinking it’s part of me. At my age now, people really don’t care. It is a funny evolution. When I was young, I liked it being on display because I felt like it was saying to people, “Go fuck yourself.” I think it was good for me at the time. It’s easy to mock your younger self, but I don’t want to betray the person I was then. That was important to her, and I respect that. I was just claiming a body that had been taken from me in my teen years. I guess your body does map your life. Mind you, I am relieved I never got all those other tattoos I liked. If I had Aquaman on my leg I don’t think I’d be sitting here saying, “That was good for me at the time.”’

Megan Oliver grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand and went to art school in Auckland. She always wanted to be a tattoo artist and make good art on skin. She trained on London’s Portobello Road with Mark Lee because, ‘When I saw his work I was blown away. I’d never seen anything that good before, so artistic, what we call in the trade “clean”. Beautiful lines, straight where they’re meant to be straight, not bleeding or blurry.’ As an apprentice, one of her jobs was to order from a needle company in upstate New York. They would send packets of loose needles that she would solder herself into various configurations, whether for outlines, shading or colouring. Now needles come pre-prepared, inks are pre-mixed and tattooing is a big industry, knowledge about every aspect of it far less arcane. With the fear around AIDS, the tattooists of the late 1980s and early 1990s were the first generation to use latex gloves. Oliver says, ‘The reality was that hepatitis, a hardier virus than HIV, was always of greater concern, but professional tattooists do follow a regime of standard precautions to avoid cross-contamination.’

Oliver moved to Australia and trained with legendary artist eX de Medici in Canberra, but has lived and worked in Sydney for a long time, currently at Little Tokyo studio. She says, ‘There’s this idea that tattoos have to have meaning or be related to someone who died, but there’s nothing wrong with getting a tattoo simply because it’s an artistic thing that appeals to you and you like the way it looks. That’s an extremely valid reason to get one.’ I ask her if she engages with what her clients are trying to express. ‘I don’t psychoanalyse their tattoos. I take them at face value and try to do a nice job.’ But she sees their positive impact. ‘Tattoos can help people feel more at home in their bodies, more at home in the world. I’ve seen it particularly with women. They end up feeling more at home in their own skin. It happened to me.

‘It’s that whole thing of existing in a patriarchy; other people’s impressions get projected onto you. I think once you’re tattooed, you’ve imprinted your own personality on your looks so people can’t project that stuff onto you so easily. Before I got tattooed, I was a bit of an angry young bootgirl with a bad haircut and a bad attitude. I wouldn’t have walked around wearing a frilly dress, not me at all. But once I started to get heavily tattooed, I felt much more at liberty to wear a dress because I thought, I can’t be mistaken for some kind of acquiescent fembot.’

Oliver says that her chosen canvas can be challenging. ‘Skin is a weird and demanding medium. Everybody’s skin is different. You never know what you’re going to get until you start. You’ll think, “Oh, this person has beautiful skin.” It’s like the skin is drinking the ink in, like it wants to be tattooed. With other people you think, “Will I have to turn my machine up? I’m really trying to grind this, and it doesn’t want to go in.” Not surprisingly, she says this happens ‘Particularly in Australia, because people get out in the sun and their skin ends up like hide. It can be difficult.’ The upside is that having invested time and money, people don’t want their tattoos to fade, so she says they’re more careful in the sun after.

One of Oliver’s clients is my friend Galina Laurie, who was among the first of my peers to get tattooed, around the same time as Monica Dux, when it was still edgy. She didn’t go to Kings Cross, seedier then than it is now, but had hers done in Sydney’s Inner West by a woman called ‘Kiwi Kim’. Looking back with her signature mix of insight and erudition, Galina says, ‘A female tattooist was interesting to me. I think “tattooed woman” has always had resonance in culture through circus, and Māori and other Polynesian women with their tattoos. There is a tradition of women being tattooed, but not a Western one, except for circus stuff. Kiwi Kim was the only woman I knew of around that time in Sydney who was tattooing.’

Galina recalls that body modification was a hot topic in her own circles, and around the world, in the 1990s. ‘I think about books I had at that time, one called Angry Women that had interviews with people like Diamanda Galás, Lydia Lunch and other feminist performance artists and musicians. I subsequently became connected to a community where that stuff happened a lot.’ Greek American musician and artist Galás’s knuckle tattoo read WE ARE ALL HIV+, described as a ‘rage-filled “corrective” to the “red ribbon as fashion statement”’.¹¹ One reason tattoos remained subcultural in the 1980s and 1990s was because of fear around contaminated blood and needles. Now, antiretrovirals + Instagram = twenty-first-century tattoo fever.

While tattoos fade, can be amended, and change along with the skin they’re drawn on, they capture a moment in time in ways few other bodily adornments can. Galina says, ‘I don’t know exactly why I got that first tattoo. I’m from a conservative middle-class family. I’d just finished my Honours degree in women’s studies, learning about feminism and women’s literature. I was around women who wore their tattoos proudly, as markers of significant things that had happened in their lives. I thought they were beautiful. It probably had something to do with me coming out as a lesbian, too. It was a gesture against my conservative upbringing, against what femininity was expected to be. I was trying to work out what kind of a woman I wanted to be.’

Her first tattoo was a bee. ‘I did a course in early modern women’s writing. There was a series of poems written by seventeenth-century working-class women – agricultural, not industrial – that had been forgotten. Some, such as Aphra Behn, were well known, but there were all these other amazing texts by women writing about their work. These women were educated enough to read and write, but the fact that their poetry survived against the odds is phenomenal given their hierarchical, patriarchal society. A motif that came up again and again [in the poems] was the bee. I loved it. I’ve always liked bees. They’re beautiful, productive, busy and purposeful. I think it’s a lovely thing to have on your arm.’

Talking over tea and cake at Galina’s house gives me the chance to see her newer tattoos. Between her first in 1993 and her next in 2011, tattoos not only became mainstream but more colourful and artful, too. Her second tattoo is an array of flannel flowers – white and woolly, scraggly but beautiful – that wrap around the original bee on her arm and grow upwards to her shoulder. Galina had two children, now teenagers, with her former partner, and she describes the flannel flowers as ‘a break-up tattoo before the break-up, something I wanted to do for myself. It was a bit like dressing up, which I love.’

Her latest tattoo, also botanical, is a work in progress. A birthday gift from friends, this one is pigface, a beautiful plant with an ugly name that grows in sandy, rocky conditions. This is the tattoo that Megan Oliver did for Galina, and she says it hurt so much that she sobbed throughout. Getting a tattoo on the ribs is indeed painful, but her tears may have come from a deeper place: this tattoo covers a breast-cancer surgery scar. A few more flowers are yet to be filled in. They will be ‘hot pink and orange, a colour-combo without compare’, she says. ‘The needle that pricks my skin now isn’t the all-too-familiar injection of anaesthetic, but the tool drawing the first line of a tattoo. This permanent scar is unlike those from surgery; this one returns a feeling of ownership over my body.’

In her memoir about living with chronic pain, Kylie Maslen writes powerfully of reclaiming her body through tattoos, which give her the agency to define it on her terms, through ink. The hurt of the tattoo needle, she writes, is less complicated than the everyday pain of endometriosis. The lack of control she might feel on the inside because of her body’s inability to heal itself becomes meaning on the outside. ‘I wear my tattoos as badges of honour for all that extra tissue, all those cysts and all that pain that remains hidden, and for all the scars that don’t.’¹² Endometriosis complicates reproductive choices and possibilities. For many women, the emotional and physical pain of infertility or baby loss can feel like treachery by their body. Like endometriosis, it can be invisible.

I adored working with editor Emma, but learnt about her miscarriages only when I started writing about tattoos. She wrote to me, ‘After miscarriage #2, I was so pissed off that I’d gone through two lots of quite excruciating pain along with all the attendant uncertainty and anxiety. As far as I could see, it was all for nothing. I thought, well, I’ve always wanted tattoos, so why don’t I deliberately go through a little bit of pain by getting tattooed, and then have something to show for it? It would be pain that I’d chosen, and when it was over I’d have something I wanted, instead of the sadness and fear I was lugging around.’ Not only was the experience of getting tattooed meaningful, so was the tattoo itself.

‘I chose a pelican for my first tattoo, our local version. It’s hands-down my favourite bird. A pelican might look incredibly silly waddling about on its stumpy legs on land – not its natural element – but once it’s in the air I don’t think there’s another bird that can beat it for glorious, effortless soaring. Not even the raptors: they’re always hunting, eyes on the ground. But pelicans, if you watch them, barely flap, so perfectly adapted are they to cruising long distances and circling up to great heights. It is so joy-inducing to watch them in the sky. They’re like flying carpets with heads. I always wished I could find that element, go cruising for a while somewhere that felt easy and right. In the aftermath of miscarriage, that feeling I had of being awkward and wrong all the time was hugely magnified. But the tattoo reminded me that I might not always feel like that, whatever happened.’ It is relevant to the story that she now has two daughters. And two tattoos. Her advice for life is as good as you’ll get anywhere: watch those pelicans soar!

It was no big deal for Emma to bare her arms at work in a publishing house, but it is a different story for a senior doctor in a busy hospital department. So, Yolanda García is not the real name of the woman who tells me that her tattoos – a quarter-sleeve of flannel flowers, like Galina Laurie – are deeply private. She remembered these ‘straggly, defiant plants’ from childhood bushwalks, but getting them drawn permanently on her skin was no casual decision. García says she saw ‘lots of tatts’ when she worked in prisons. ‘That was when I first spent time with people who had marks on their skin as a form of tribalism, to proclaim publicly that they belonged to a particular group.’ Later, when she became a clinician, she remembers seeing a patient with the hand-hewn rough numbers that marked her as a survivor of Auschwitz. García describes an intensely charged moment, the patient’s tattoos telling the story of a life and of the horrors of twentieth-century history. ‘When they see you seeing those numbers. Looking at me looking at them. There was quiet, wordless acknowledgment of what it meant.’

García got a tattoo in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley when she was seventeen, but waited a long time to get the big pieces she wanted. Now in her fifties, she has tattoos planned beyond her flannel flowers that will also relate to place – she wants to honour nature’s resilience. The new art will be done by a trans tattoo artist in Melbourne with whom García feels a sense of collaboration and respect. Even so, she says you have to accept that it might not turn out exactly as you expect. ‘There is no perfect. You have to be willing to take a risk.’ She expresses the purpose of her own tattoos very clearly: ‘Mine are for me, no one else. They are a gesture of self-expression I had not allowed myself earlier, the painful cost of my acculturation. It’s a way of tracing my own journey.’

Katherine Tamiko Arguile’s tattoos are mostly visible, which is how I found myself asking her about them when we met in Canberra a few years ago. We caught up to talk tattoos some more at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, where she was celebrating the publication of her debut novel. It turned out that her most visible tattoos, which I hadn’t forgotten since I saw them, aren’t her only ones. Her first, a slightly impulsive red peony, is on her lower hip. ‘It’s not aged well. It was done in Portobello Market, just down the road from where I lived in London. It was a hygienic but old-school parlour – the guy who ran it had tattoos over his face. One of those places where you look through samples and go, “I’ll have this one!”’ After that, Arguile took her time deciding on the others. Beautifully executed, they reflect the dual cultures that formed her, but which she has grappled to articulate to herself and to the world for her whole life.

Arguile grew up in Japan. Japanese was her first language, the one she spoke with her mother. Her father was English, and when she was eleven she was sent to boarding school in England. It was a wrench from all she knew, one that she describes as ‘an amputation’. Decades later, living with her partner in Adelaide, she found herself searching Instagram for a tattooist skilled enough to do fine botanical drawings. Adelaide tattooist Harry Plane was well up to the task. On her inner right arm, not always on display, is a black-inked branch of sakura, cherry blossom. Both budding and falling, its petals flutter down her arm. Pointing to it, she says, ‘This, first of all, represents my Japanese culture. It’s such an iconic Japanese image. But it also takes in the notion of wabi-sabi, the ephemerality of life. Remembering that everything passes gives you resilience. Knowing your life is finite makes you feel more alive.’ Above the cherry blossom is a precise geometrical representation of ouroboros, the snake that eats itself. Arguile says it is more Western, but the partially dotted circle evokes the idea of openness and constant change. ‘I put those up there to go with the botanics. I like that kind of graphic.’

Mirroring the position of the Japanese tree on her right arm, her left arm displays another archetypical tree. ‘It’s the European oak. Very English, which is my other heritage. An oak can be two hundred years old but still produce acorns. It’s a reminder that however old you get, as long as you’re still active you can produce new ideas.’ Oak-nut cupules, gloriously intricate, drop to either side of Arguile’s inner elbow. Her oak tree also has geometrical symbols above it, the change-symbolising triangular delta. ‘I’ve always had a tendency to transform what I do, who I am.’

Since these trees were inked on her skin, Arguile has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bringing new self-understanding. Her tattoos have talismanic properties, symbolically at least. ‘My secret shame of not coping, having constant burnouts and let-downs. I look at these tattoos and think, “You might feel weak, a failure, but you’re still standing. And you’ve survived lots of things.”’ Arguile has reflected on the way that class as well as race has made her. But feelings of alienation take their toll: being removed from the familiarity of her culture and sent to boarding school in another country; breaking her back in a speedboat accident; surviving drug-fuelled club life; her parents’ separation; breakdowns; her mother’s death and the premature deaths of other beloved Japanese family members; the stresses of corporate work that she loathed. ‘I’m still standing. I survived all those things. The oak represents that.’

Cherry blossom and oak tree are a statement of hybrid identity – who she is, how she sees herself, how she is seen. British identity lends itself to hyphenation, whereas being biracial in Japan is complicated because, Arguile says, it’s a racist culture. Japan’s relationship with tattoos is, on the surface, paradoxical: the art of Japanese tattoos is world-renowned, and yet there tattoos are – to use another Polynesian loanword – taboo. Arguile has worked through these tensions and says she even toyed with the idea of getting her tattoos done in Japan. Traditional tebori, one word of many in Japanese for ink-patterning on the body, doesn’t use buzzing machine-needles but a persimmon-wood stick, needle and silk. It is time-consuming, excruciating and beautiful. She did research for her novel in southernmost Okinawa – a place she loves – a matriarchal society where women historically had their hands tattooed. But within Japan, Okinawa is seen as foreign, different.

‘When I got my tattoos done, I was really disillusioned about my family connections and relationships in Japan. I felt that my own culture had rejected me, that I didn’t belong. And even though I am fifty per cent Japanese, my first language was Japanese, and I was raised in Tokyo like a Japanese kid, it will never accept me as one of its own, ever. So I thought, “Sod them, I’ll get tattoos done.” I knew that would make it difficult for me to go to hot springs – onsen. Tattooed people aren’t allowed in because of the association with yakuza. Tattoos can mark you as an outsider – not that that was why I did it. This was not done for other people. It was for me.’

Arguile juggles her career as a writer with owning and running a busy cafe in Adelaide. We agree that chefs and baristas are among the most tattooed cohorts, so of course those she works alongside encourage her to get more. But she says no; the narratives on her arm, uniting a dislocated self as they do, are enough for now.

Words on skin, misspelt or not, matter. Tattoos that affirm personal identity, fight for political and social change, or memorialise trauma and loss are not confined to beautifully rendered flora and fauna. #ICan’tBreathe tattoos appeared in solidarity on activists’ necks after George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer. These words, with which Floyd pleaded for his life, became a rallying cry of the racial justice movement. Dashinque Hall, a Minneapolis tattoo artist, offered discounts on work she did relating to Black Lives Matter, donating her proceeds to Gianna Floyd, George Floyd’s daughter. One of Hall’s clients, Terace Diver, said ‘It’s something I wanted to carry with me. This is a symbol of representation. I’ve been feeling proud. We are standing up for ourselves.’¹³

2021 Australian of the Year Grace Tame, a child sexual abuse survivor and law-reform advocate, has a much-discussed tattoo on her hand. It says EAT MY FEAR. Her explanation about its meaning is rousing. ‘It’s about swallowing the terror and moving forward regardless. That’s what predators weaponise – they weaponise our fear. That’s the foundation of their psychological manipulation, which is a huge element of prolonged sexual abuse . . . the cycle of psychological manipulation, as opposed to the physical, criminal behaviour. And predators want us to feel that fear. I say, no, let’s transfer it back into their hearts, where it belongs.’¹⁴

Tattoos can also contribute to reclaiming hundreds of lost languages, stolen, like so much else, from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Melbourne playwright Jane Harrison is a Muruwari woman from near Brewarrina in north-western New South Wales. She describes Muruwari country as red dirt, river people, fish traps. She says, ‘I don’t know many Muruwari words. But me and my daughters all have mukinj (women) tattooed on our forearm and I’m keen to get kalkara (family) on the other. Reintroducing language is hard if you have grown up so far from it.’¹⁵

Military ink runs deep in history. Crusaders had devotional crosses painted or branded on their chests to ensure Christian burial in the event of their death. Pilgrims returned from the Holy Land with tattoos as souvenirs; extraordinarily, Razzouk Tattoo parlour in Jerusalem brandishes the claim ‘Since 1300’. Nautical miles travelled notched up tattoos for sailors, who sought the heroic status of sea miles in the way frequent flyers acquire air miles within far cushier loyalty programs. Sailors stamped their skin as if they were passports: a turtle or King Neptune for crossing the equator; an anchor for sailing the Atlantic; a swallow to mark 5000 nautical miles. (The Earth’s circumference, therefore, is 4.6 swallows.) The anchors tattooed on cartoon-character Popeye the Sailor Man’s bulky forearms were as much a part of his uniform as his sailor’s cap. Crossed anchors on the hands denoted a bosun (boatswain’s mate), not to be confused with deckhands, who rigged themselves with tattooed wrist-ropes. A nautical star, even when tattooed, would always guide a sailor home.

Twenty-first-century military conflicts have transformed the skin of some military personnel into a living document, comparable to World War I war diaries or letters home. These contemporary tattoos rescript a practice that has long been part of military culture. Tattoos on those serving in the armed forces can be bloodthirsty and jingoistic, but may also express identity and belonging, pain and loss. They illustrate emotion and vulnerability that must be suppressed during actual combat. Many tattoos commemorate comrades who did not return, fallen but not forgotten. They are deeply individual.

Two emotional and bold exhibitions remove veterans’ fatigues and reveal their tattoos – and all the emotion they contain – to the world. A 2014 Californian online project called ‘War Ink’ uses tattoos as an entry point to tell the stories of marine corps, infantry and air force veterans deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq.¹⁶ Its tagline sums up the project: ‘24 veterans, 100 tattoos, 1000 stories. Some stories are told with words, others are told in ink.’ A 2021 Australian War Memorial oral-history project and photographic exhibition called ‘Ink in the Lines’, curated by Stephanie Boyle, revolves around the tattoos of veterans from Middle East conflicts and peacekeeping missions to Rwanda and East Timor.¹⁷ In telling stories, celebrating artwork and sharing veterans’ experiences, both projects transmit narratives of trauma and loss, achievement and struggle. Tattoos are a way for veterans to process their experiences and to heal.

One extraordinary example can be found on the chest of a former US Army gunner who now lives in Grass Valley, California, at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. He lost his lower legs and almost died when his scout sniper platoon was ambushed and hit by an IED in Afghanistan’s Zabul province in 2005. A tattoo on his chest memorialises his Chuck Taylor–sneakered feet. Winged like angels, his feet rise above the flames and carnage, heaven-bound. The words tattooed on the arm of returned soldier Elaine Gallagher, who served as an Australian peacekeeper in East Timor, summarise the themes of most of the military tattoos I saw, American and Australian: COURAGE. ENDURANCE. MATESHIP. SACRIFICE.

Veterans often feel lost on their return home from service. Many struggle to rebuild their lives, and mental illness and suicide loom large, in interviews, in their everyday experiences and on their flesh. Jason Deitch, co-creator of the War Ink project and a veteran himself, said, ‘Without shared understanding, the men and women who have served cannot come all the way home.’ So, tattoos become a vehicle for starting different kinds of conversations between military and civilian cultures. As returned servicemember James Carter says in a video that forms part of the Australian exhibition, ‘There’s a story behind everything. Like we’re sitting here now, I’ll happily have a chat for an hour over a beer, I’ll tell you about every single one of my tattoos and my stories, that doesn’t bother me. That’s how people learn. It doesn’t have to be a two-hundred-page book, it can be as simple as a tattoo on an arm.’¹⁸

One tattoo in the Australian exhibition leapt out at me, perhaps because of the beaming portrait that accompanied it. Former Private Miles Wootten is a veteran of Operation Tamar, Australia’s 1994–95 contribution to UNAMIR II, the United Nations’ peacekeeping mission to Rwanda. Wootten now lives on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, but at only twenty-two years of age, he landed in a country that had just experienced genocide, a million citizens murdered by fellow Rwandans of different ethnicity. Arriving onto a killing field of death, he was assigned some horrific tasks as part of the cleaning up and rebuilding. Incomprehensible civilian violence, and an international humanitarian mission with impossible aims and unclear rules of engagement, ensured that Rwanda is a wellspring of trauma for everyone who lived through the genocide, and the peacekeepers and aid-workers who arrived in its aftermath. Wootten experienced post-traumatic stress disorder because of what he’d seen and the terrible knowledge that his mission had arrived too late to stop the atrocities. He saw the consequences of that and could not forget them.

Rather than burying his experience, Wootten’s tattoos display it with pride. A simple question, ‘What’s that on your arm?’, can open conversation around the toughest of subjects. On one arm he has a fighting kangaroo wearing a slouch hat, the number 652 tattooed on the roo’s arm (the number of Australians deployed to Rwanda) and Par Oneri underneath, the motto of the Transport Corps he belonged to. The tattoo on the other arm includes the banner AUSSIE PEACE KEEPER. This tattoo combines Australian and Rwandan elements: a shield with the word miryango, the Kinyarwanda word for ‘family’, with a red poppy at its centre. Miles sees the poppy as a symbol of the Rwandan blood spilt. A Rwandan and an Australian flag attached to crossed spears flank the shield. The idea to include miryango was his daughter’s; only six months old when he left, the trauma of Rwanda has touched her life too. Wootten says another veteran of Operation Tamar saw his tattoo and sent him a message, asking, ‘Mate, can I copy that?’ He now has.

Few soldiers return to the place where they were deployed, but Wootten has gone back to Rwanda twice. He first went back in 2018 with his brother Steve, and later with his children. It was an emotional time: meeting people, going to places where he had worked and visiting the Kigali Genocide Memorial. I saw a photo of him showing his tattoo to young Rwandans who weren’t even born when he first visited their country. The tattoo gives them all something to talk about.¹⁹ His story is written on his skin, as are so many others, whether they want to talk about it or not.