Looking at the World's Tattoos
Photographer Chris Rainier travels the globe in search of tattoos and other examples of the urge to embellish our skin
- By Abigail Tucker
- Photographs by Chris Rainier
- Smithsonian magazine, October 2010, Subscribe
(Page 2 of 2)
The modern West’s first recorded encounter with the Polynesian practice of tattowing dates from 1769, when Joseph Banks—a naturalist aboard the British ship Endeavour—watched a 12-year-old girl (the “patient,” he called her, though modern aficionados might prefer the term “collector”) being extensively adorned. Banks’ description is brief but harrowing: “It was done with a large instrument about 2 inches long containing about 30 teeth,” he wrote in his journal. “Every stroke...drew blood.” The girl wailed and writhed but two women held her down, occasionally beating her. The agony lasted more than an hour.
Yet sailors must have been intrigued. Soon they were returning from the South Pacific sporting tattoos of their own. The English recoiled (apparently unaware that ancient Europeans had also been devoted collectors), and as the colonial powers extended their reach around the globe, native people—often urged by missionaries—gradually began to relinquish their traditions, an abandonment that continues today. Back in Europe, tattoos were persistently associated with unruly sailors, although they did achieve a subversive glamour in certain circles: in the early 1900s, the future Marchioness of Londonderry tattooed a snake, a star and a coat of arms on her leg, and King George V boasted a Japanese-style dragon.
Today people are appropriating these ancient practices, Rainier believes, because they want to carve out an identity in a chaotic postindustrial age by inscribing shoulders and shins with symbols of love, death and belonging.
Even if a design has no literal significance, the act of tattooing is an initiation rite in itself. “A tattoo stood—and among many peoples still stands—for many things, including the ability to tolerate pain,” says Nina Jablonski, a Pennsylvania State University anthropologist and author of Skin: A Natural History. Sometimes, physical loveliness becomes inseparable from personal suffering. In West African nations like Togo and Burkina Faso, where scarification is common, Rainier would often ask to photograph the most beautiful man and woman in a given village. “Inevitably they would be the most scarred,” Rainier says. “You didn’t gain your beauty until you were scarred.”
Taken as art, tattoos unite disparate cultures, says Skip Pahl, who displayed Rainier’s photographs at California’s Oceanside Museum of Art. The images attracted an unusually diverse group of museumgoers: Samoan immigrants, surfers, gang members, U.S. Marines and devout Latinos, all of whom have their own tattoo aesthetic. The exhibition was accompanied by a runway show in which tattoo artists paraded their most exquisitely inked customers.
After visiting the Mentawai last year—a trip previously thwarted by security concerns after September 11, 2001, and by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami—Rainier says his tattoo portfolio is at last complete. His own epidermis remains thus far unimproved, but that’s about to change: “I said to myself once the project is over and done that I will pick an artist and a design,” he says. “I’m at that point now.”
Having spent 20 years exploring the power and permanence of tattoos, however, he’s finding the selection very difficult: “We live in a culture where everything is disposable, and it’s like, ‘wow, that’s forever.’ ”
Abigail Tucker is the magazine’s staff writer. Photographer Chris Rainier is working on a book about traditional masks.
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Comments (7)
A tatoo is not permanent, and its this impermanence that actually aroused my desire to get a tatoo. Nothing is permanent in this universe. Everything is constantly changing. This notion that we are the macro-cosm, we are the universe, and that we are changing like everything else relinquised my desire to make things stay the way they are. Thus I got tatooed. Now I have five and am considering getting one more. It's an act of owning your body to me, although I'll be gone and a thousand years from now none of this will matter.
Posted by hartford campbell on November 1,2010 | 02:45 PM
Ms. Tucker's mention of the "subversive glamor" that tattooing achieved in some of the higher circles of European culture reminded me of an article I came across from a Wisconsin newspaper in the 1890's which I proffer here:
THE EARL IS TATTOOED
Husband of Miss Cornelia Martin Is Covered With Designs.
NEW YORK, April 20—Somebody has discovered that the Earl of Craven, who was recently married to Miss Bradley-Martin, is tattooed. His proud flesh is said to be literally decorated with coats of arms and such things, interspersed with "other designs." This interesting piece of information comes from the inner regions of the Racquet Club. The plunge bath is stated to be the place where the earl's spots were first revealed. The coats of arms are declared to be of all sizes, from the big Craven shield that covers his whole breast to numerous small ones artistically scattered over his limbs. What the other designs are is not specially stated, but among other things it is said that on one hip is the monogram of a young lady who once lived in India, and with whom the earl was much infatuated at one time. The story goes that she was engaged to the earl, and that while he was journeying to England to get his friends to consent to their marriage, he fell in with an old sailor who gratified his romantic whim to tattoo with indelible ink her initials upon the earl's hip. The other designs were placed upon his body during this same trip, the most conspicuous one being the Craven coat of arms which was executed in blue and red upon the earl's chest. The story has created quite a sensation among the friends and acquaintances of the young couple.
Oshkosh Daily Northwestern
April 20, 1893
Posted by David Allen Jones on October 27,2010 | 04:13 PM
Since reading Ms. Abigail Tucker's article about tattooing, scarification, and body piercing, and seeing the accompianing photographs (by Mr. Chris Rainier) in the October, 2010 issue (Volume 41, Number 6) beginning on Page 56; I've been thinking of the numerous recent news reports about pirates hijacking ships on the Atlantic ocean; and the beheadings and stonings being performed by so-called religious fanatics - who believe that their religious law trumps any civil laws to the contrary - I'm wondering: Is civilization on a fast track back to the Dark Ages?
Posted by Evelyn K. Anderson on October 6,2010 | 07:06 AM
I'm a face and body painter, also an armchair anthropologist, and love reading about the human spiritual connection. September's Scientific American has a fascinating story about how Neanderthals painted shells, and their own skin, using natural pigments. I believe decorating our bodies is one of the things that helped us become human, right along with making tools and the singing/babbling that must have preceded speech. When you see a small child encountering a soft substance for the first time - first they check if it smells good enough to eat, and they also rub or smear it on their skin. Then they try to smear it on someone else. It seems like a universal social skill: change your body, share it with someone else. I have no desire to tattoo or scarify because I don't like bloodshed and pain; for me the painted body is the ideal expression. We change every day, why not adapt our bodies' expression of our mood and worldview?
Posted by Alana Dill on October 5,2010 | 07:30 PM
Shocked, disappointed and disgusted that Ms. Tucker glibly suggests that "modern aficionados might prefer the term collector" for a 12 year old girl being tortured in agony for over an hour by two adults as they brutally beat her and bloodily scar her, over and over.
No, the term is neither "patient" nor "collector". It's victim, pure and simple. No matter what year it is or was. Forcing children to be scarred then, as now, is grotesque and not an art form. Or maybe Ms. Tucker and her editor think that scarring an American child with cigarette butts and scissors for a contemporary adults' misguided cultural heritage would be o.k.? It's misguided cultural anthropological fascinations that allow for children all over the world to continue to be harmed.
Your readers deserve and expect better from Smithsonian.
Lynn Magers-Pardo
Posted by Lynn Magers-Pardo on October 1,2010 | 04:37 AM
As a woman who has been in the tattoo industry for almost 10 years now, I was happy to see an article that did not seek to exploit tattooing or to demonize it. My only wish would be to see more Westerners with tatooes, to dispel the myth that it is only something practiced by bikers and criminals. Thanks for the well written, thoughtful, piece.
Posted by Kelly on September 30,2010 | 07:27 PM
An article about tattoos with one picture?
Posted by Kerry on September 25,2010 | 04:20 PM