About Body Art & Tattoo: Controversial signs on the body.

[abrinafft]

there's nothing more horrable n disgusting than tattoo, piercing tonnels and other similar defects but it's all modern gay media, urge to vomit...

 

[Shelter]

there's nothing more horrable n disgusting than tattoo, piercing tonnels and other similar defects but it's all modern gay media, urge to vomit...

You may like tattoos or you may dislike them ... but "defects"? - really? And why "modern gay media"? What have modern tattoos to do with "gay media"? I don't like tattoos as well but many other persons gay or hetero like them. And I think it is their - and only THEIR decision.

 

[gorgik9]

Europe.

While it's well known that there were tattooing traditions in a number of non-classic and pre-christian peoples in Europe, such as the Thracians (Thrace was in what is nowadays north-eastern Greece, south-eastern Bulgaria and north-western Turkey) and the Picts (in nowadays northern Scotland)...

...more important to the development of European ideas and attitudes in the long run were thw ambiguities in Ancient Roman society as well as the emerging Christian tradition: Tattoo was sometimes used in Roman society as a method for identifying someone as a slave (and, hence, tattooing could come unpleasantly close to branding); concerning Christianity we know that in environments where Christians were in the minority, tattooing was often used to enhance group cohesion. To give a couple of examples: Coptic christians in Egypt and catholic Croatian Christians living in Bosnia-Herzegovina:

Tattooed catholic Croatian women in Bosnia, two examples.

Among the earliest christian symbols we have the ICHTHYS, which on the one hand just was the ordinary ancient Greek word for "fish", but it could also be an acronym forIesous Christos, Theou Yios, Soter - or in plain English: "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour". The ICHTHYS was of course easily transformed into a visual symbol, also easy to tattoo, so some early christians actually used tattoo to confess their faith and identifying themselves as christians:

ICHTHYS symbol:

A profoundly important historical change started when emperors Galerius and Konstantin made Christianity a religio licita (a licit religion) in 311-313 A.D., followed by catholic christianity becoming the state church of the Roman Empire with the edict of emperor Theodosius in 380 A.D.

Konstantin prohibited facial tattoo in 316 A.D. but otherwise the popular idea that tattooing disappeared in Europe during the Middle Ages due to religious edicts is a myth.

There were no general prohibitions and it didn't generally disappeare. What was discouraged from the 8th century onwards was "heathen" tattooing. Certain types of tattooing had - however - a positive importance for European christians, such as the famous Jerusalem Cross tattoo, showing that you've been on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Jerusalem:

In the next post I'll talk about the upsurge of secular tattoo in Europe from the 18th century on.

 

[gorgik9]

The upsurge of secular tattoo in Europe.

From the 18th century on, we get an upsurge of tattooing which hasn't any definite relation to pilgrimage and other christian penitent practices.

I think it's reasonable to say that it didn't have a single cause, but a set of different causes explaining why a number of historical developments emerged from the 18th century on, making up a set of new traditions of secular tattooing in Europe.

First of all, mercantile capitalism and colonial ambitions pushed vast numbers of people into trade and shipping from the late 17th century on, first over the Atlantic and somewhat later to cirnavigate the entire globe, sailing all the seas. Unprecedented numbers of people started crossing the oceans - as sailors, merchants, slave traders, landowners, settlers, soldiers, colonialists, buccaneers/pirates, adventurers, explorers and scientists.

Some adventurers/sailors/colonialists etc - secondly - influenced the literate European public through their published writings about their voyages. The books of William Dampier (1651-1715) are among the early examples, A New Voyage Round the World (1697) being the first of his publications followed by six more, but arguably the most influential of these voyage of discovery travelogues in the 18th century must be Louis Antoine de Bougainville's (1729-1811) covering his cirnavigation 1766-1769, published in 1771 under the title Le voyage autour du monde, a book attracting vast attention by European intellectuals and hotly discussed for years, in particular for what it said about people, society and culture in the Polynesian islands. Bougainville inspired Denis Diderot to write his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, written in 1772, but published only as late as 1796.

However! The sailor-explorers didn't just write books about their journeys; some of them brought tattooed Pacific natives to Europe, sometimes to show them off in taverns for money, sometimes to meet royalty and get their portraits painted. Probably the first tattooed Pacific native in Europe was a man called Jeoly, who was brought to London by William Dampier in the 1690s. Experts on traditional Pacific tattooing like anthropologist Lars Krutak is of the opinion that the pictures of Jeoly shows a man with a tattoo design typical of Melanesia, in particular the Caroline Islands.

Engraving of Jeoly:

The most famous tattooed Pacific native was Mai (usually called Omai, but the "O" seems to have been a European misunderstanding) from the island of Huahine near Tahiti who was brought to England in 1774 by captain Furneaux, one of the officers workin with James Cook on Cook's second voyage in the Pacific. Mai became a celebrity and got his portrait painted and drawn by none less than sir Joshua Reynolds:

Another interesting picture from about the same time is the engraving below, the so-called Club-Carrier from Nukaiva. The artist obviously made a "tattooed engraved version" of Polykleitos scolpture Doryphoros (The Spear-Carrier):

The discussions about Bougainville's and Diderot's writings became the canvas on which the image of Polynesia as the Earthly Paradise was painted, and the scene where the Polynesian was proclaimed "The Good Savage" - a heavily inked good savage.

In the long run more important for a number of European traditions of secular tattoo to emerge were - in my opinion and thirdly the vast number of ordinary people that had become aquainted with non-christian tattooing on their voyages as sailors, soldiers, merchants etc all over the world, experimenting with primitive iconographies vaguely alluding to the image of the Pacifics as Paradise on Earth - with palmtrees and nude women.

An important fourth factor was heavily tattooed men and women becoming popular attractions in fairs and carnivals, somewhat like acrobats, strongmen and wild animals becoming hugely popular fairground entertainment.

 

[suchat13]

I love man with tattoo but I don't want on my body.

 

[gorgik9]

Some de-mythologization.

I think it's also necessary to engage in some de-mythologizing concerning tattooed sailors and criminals!

I remember from my childhood and early youth in Sweden in the 1960's-70's that if someone had a tattoo it was almost always taken for granted that he - I don't remember a single tattooed woman in my countryside village of my childhood - must be or had been a sailor or possibly a criminal having served some time in prison.

I don't think there's much point in denying that, as collectives, sailors and "prison customers" probably had a clearly higher frequency of tattooed people than the general male population in a Western European country 50-150 years ago. But there's more to it than that: The tattoos of sailors and prisoners were by far much more doented by civil and naval authorities than tattoos in any other social group, and thus when the social scientists and physicians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (people like Lombroso, Lacassagne, Berchon and Wuttke) got interested in analyzing the social meaning of tattooing, they based their studies on doentation handed down from prison wardens and navy officials and - hence! - got a very grim picture of what kind of person a tattooed man must be. According to Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso it would just be a matter of time when a tattooed person committed some hideous crime...

But all the Lombrosos of Europe forgot that there was quite a vogue for tattooing among members of the royal families and other male socialites at the turn of the century 1900, like in England we had the Duke of York (later king George V), his brother the Duke of Clarence (later prince Albert) and their father king Edward VII, in Russia Tzar Nikolai II and in Denmark king Frederik IX. The level of annotation of royal tattooing was - however - close to nil, and hence the scientific and "scientific" social analysts of the meaning of tattooing didn't have much doents of royal tattooing to digest.

 

[gorgik9]

The Pacifics: Polynesia.

Tahiti is situated in the Society Islands, Polynesia.

Some modern Tahiti tattoo in a book by Italian photographer Gian Paolo Barbieri:

 

[gorgik9]

The Pacifics : Micronesia.

Micronesia is the part of the Pacifics to the east of the Philippines and northwest of Polynesia. Micronesia comprises the Caroline Islands, Marianer Islands, Marshall Islands, Gilbert Islands (or Kiribati) and Palau.

Some tattoo designs from various parts of Micronesia:

 

[gorgik9]

Maori Tattoo, New Zeeland.

The Maori people probably originally came to New Zeeland from Polynesia. The by far most famous maori tattoo design is the moko, the face tattoo.

Now just imagine a group of Maori warriers with full moko doing the traditional war cry and challenge, the haka! Intimidating!





Borneo.

Some traditional tattoo designs from Borneo:

 

[gorgik9]

North American indigenous tattooing traditions.

While body paint among indian populations has always been known and remembered, it's in just the last few decades that the knowledge of indigenous tattooing traditions have recieved a sort of renaissance.

Japan.

The japanese tradition of full body pictorial tattooing is in my opinion very hard to compete with in terms of aesthetic refinement and sophistication and in terms of strong colours.

But this tradition isn't as ancient as one might think: We know that it is a tradition imported to Japan from China in 1757, to be more particular: the tradition of figurative and decorative tattooing in China, described and doented in, and mediated through a number of medieval and early modern Chinese books.

What kickstarted the Japanese tradition was that the 16th century Chinese "tattooing novel" titled Shui hu zhuan's (Water Margin) got translated into Japanese as Suikoden and became wildly popular.

 

[gorgik9]

I think this will be my last post in this thread, at least for the time being.

But the topic as such is of course without limits and boundaries, and who knows what the future will bring...

 

[waistingmytime]

Well , Thanks for all the work you put into this amazing thread ! Hopefully there will be more for us in the future

 

[Shelter]

Well , Thanks for all the work you put into this amazing thread ! Hopefully there will be more for us in the future

:agree::agree::agree::agree::agree::agree:

 

[gorgik9]

@ waistingmytime & Shelter

Thanks for the appreciation guys!!!

I've already got stuff for new threads in the pipeline!