Words by Zoe Coles Art by Monica McNaught-Lee
Growing Strong The tattoo of a pin-up girl on a sailor’s arm is flat, ironed onto skin. She does not speak, mouth poised open in deep violent reds. Imprinted on skin without skin of her own, moving only when he moves, a toe twitching when a bicep is flexed. When speaking to Time magazine on the rise of post-2016 election feminist tattoos, Margot Mifflin, who authored Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, expressed that this reflected a “reassertion of the claim over their bodies during a time when women’s bodies issues were so prominent in the media from discussions and debates over breast cancer, eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, motherhood and abortion…I think that tattoos became a way for women to take control of their own bodies and define them how they wanted to.” The sailor’s tattoo of the pin-up comes to life, and seeks permanency in herself. Tattooing is a practice created by Indigenous people that colonialist sailors co-opted and appropriated during the various invasions executed in the socalled “age of discovery.” The word tattoo itself is from the Samoan word tatau, meaning “to strike.” In Fiji, Veiqia is a rite of passage for women that was brutally interrupted by British invaders who introduced fines and described the practice as “disfigurement.” Even though the practice was condemned, attempts were made to collect and collate specimens for British museum collections, to give physicality and reinforce the idea of distance between ‘us and them’ in their fragile glasshoused exhibitions. However, as anthropologist Karen Jacobs noted “the tattooed body is hard to collect.” It is precisely this inability to collect, to fragment, to take away, that allows for the art of tattooing to be a distinctly feminist one. In an era where feminine, non-binary and trans bodies are battlegrounds against patriarchal dominance (abortion rights, disordered eating, rape, sexual harassment, victim blaming); to get a tattoo is to say my body belongs to me. Fuck you, this is mine and I’ll show you as I paint it how I please. The tattooed feminist body is an exercise in affirming agency. It is a reclamation, a refusal. Where bodies are supposedly destined to be capitalised upon - hiding ink at work as to not interrupt customer’s fantasies of service people as robots without stories to tell - tattoos insist on a voice. The patriarchal need for feminine bodies to be untouched, unmarked, undamaged is an attempt at continuing the paedophilic culture of “feminised purity” perpetuated under constructs of virginity. The nagging stranger that questions what about when you’re old expects an invisibility of elderly feminine bodies that have expired beyond their days of sexualisation and baby-making. The tattoo sags on wrinkled skin that has seen more days than you and I, and breaths, I am still here, my stories inscribed, beating, bleeding, clinging onto skin because this body is still mine. To ink one’s body with imagery and symbols that reflect individual taste, stories and history is an exercise in body neutrality. It rebels against the social currencies conventionally added and subtracted by the passive and uncontrollable aspects of the body one exists within, and instead the interior-self expands and rises like oil on water to the very top layer of skin where active choices of how I shall be perceived can be made. Feminised people are taught to contain their desires, to move aside, to make space for someone else. A tattoo is a decision on a platform that is so rarely afforded choices. It bridges body and soul, framing pieces of existence - both sorrow and bliss - into permanency. An outline of a home town, the name of the matriarchal grandmother, a snake that wraps herself around the forearm refusing to shed skin.
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