“The body is the physical link between our souls, the outside world, and ourselves. It is the medium through which we most directly project ourselves in social life; our use, decoration and presentation of it say precise things about the society in which we live, the degree of our integration within that society, and the controls which society exerts over the inner person” (Ebin, 1979:iv).

While often dismissed as a somewhat mystical and an incomprehensible aesthetic, tattoo was once a living symbol of common participation in the cyclical and subsistence culture of the hunter-gatherer. Tattoo recorded the “biographies” of personhood, reflecting individual and social experience through an array of significant relationships that oscillated between the poles of masculine and feminine, human and animal, sickness and health, the living and the dead. Arguably, tattoo provided a nexus between the individual and communally defined forces that shape perceptions of existence.

The aim of this paper is to prove, women’s tattoo practices, although viewed as tabu, must be seen as a means of

To summarize, the arguments I have advanced support my aim in proving that women’s tattoo practices, although viewed as tabu, must be seen as a means of cultural expression and nonverbal communication within modern society. Due to the associations with pain and deviancy from the norm, tattooing carries overtones linked with forms of expression primarily coded as masculine in North American mainstream culture, which is often perceived in general as inappropriate for women. In addition, tattooing represents a cultural (rather than a natural inscription). Therefore women choosing to become tattooed in our society are perceived as crossing cultural categories and entering an ambiguous zone of gender coding.

Cash, T., and Pruzinsky, T., Body Images: Development, Deviance and Change, New York: GuilfordPress, 1990.

The fact that these categorizations of female behavior may bear little resemblance to the actual choices women make when they become tattooed merely reinforces and points to the strength conventional categories have developed in the Western psyche (Barthel, 1988; Blanchard, 1991; Firth, 1973; Goldin, 1986).

Bordo, S., The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

That tattooing is gendered is made clear by Sam Steward, Ph.D., an English professor who left academia to be a tattoo artist in Chicago and who kept notes for Alfred Kinsey on the sexual motivations for tattooing. He asserts (in the few instances that he mentions them) that “ladies” don't go into tattoo shops and that “nice girls don't get tattooed” (Steward 1991:128). He characterizes women who get tattoos as “ugly, lank-haired skags, with ruined landscapes of faces and sagging hose and run-over heels” (Steward 1991:127) and “as lesbians who scare men away” (Steward 1991:128). Steward lauds tattoos as transgressive and transforming for men, but he did not accept women's desire to rebel.

Some topics in this essay:
Arleen Dallery, Vale Juno, Fashioned Self, Western World, Tattoos Western, Procupius Gaza, Nancy Chodorow, Mystery Tattooing, Body Decorated”, North American, vale juno, body art, gell 1993, blanchard 1991, berman 1986, university press, vale juno 1989, wilshire 1989, juno 1989, western culture, ardner 1981, philadelphia temple university, temple university press, form visual communication, blanchard 1991 firth,