Inked

Words by Zoe Coles Art by Monica McNaught-Lee

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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1. Symbolic tattoo that represents the Malaka tribe of West Timor. 2. Face tattoo of a woman of the Li ethnic minority of Hainan, China. 3. Traditional veiqia hand tattoo tattooed as part of a Veiqia revival project.

Most importantly though, a tattoo is a denial of disappearance. Once it is inked, it cannot go away. Once we are here, we will stand our ground.

After the cultural, societal and economic needs for the silence of women, unpaid labour, non-complaining, emotional labour, taking up less space, disappearing quietly, gently, accepting the pain inherent to womanhood, through invasions onto the body from strangers, rape, the white men sitting in parliament voting against pro-choice bills, protest softly, don’t disturb, lobotomies and diagnosis of hysteria for those that try to be heard. The First Nations women who prevailed in matriarchal societies that were systematically destroyed under colonialism, quiet now...hush disappear quiet now, to be seen, sexualised and fetishised but not to be heard, like children, patronised, run along now, now come back here…ink persists. A denial of the disappearance that we were expected to inhabit, like ghosts. I am still here in this body. My body belongs to me.

During the Japanese occupation of Malaka, East Timor during World War II, women tricked the Japanese soldiers by heavily tattooing themselves and thus leading the Japanese to believe they were married and could not be taken into forced sexual slavery, known as jugun lanfu or comfort women. Their markings signify rebellion and resistance, a refusal to move. What signalled being taken by a man in marriage was really a band of women who saw men’s respect for other men as higher than that for women and turned that against them. They marked themselves in tessellating patterns of ink that remain on them today, as they too remain in Malaka, largely in the village of Uma Thos, wrinkled and beautifully visible, a continuation of that initial denial of disappearance.

Almost eighty years later on my eighteenth birthday, I am tattooed with a drawing I did when I was fourteen. I am taken by me and for me. A refusal, a rebellion, a speech, a story - all inscribed, insisting on being noticed.