We speak with multiple women who view tattoos as a way to celebrate their culture and identity, revive traditions abolished by colonisation, and transform scars into works of art
You get some interesting (often unwelcome) questions as a woman with tattoos. Like “Can I touch it?”, or “How will you hide them on your wedding day?”
Shame, promiscuity and undesirability are common associations people have made with women who have chosen to decorate their skin. But many of those women have a very different perspective.
“As a relatively heavily tattooed person, you definitely receive judgement sometimes,” says Akiko Sakai, a model and founder of The Studio, which teaches art and yoga in Hong Kong. “On the flip side, there is so much appreciation, and I would have to say in my experience that the appreciation outweighs the judgement. The perception of women with tattoos is changing in a positive way.”
In 1997, American journalist and author Margot Mifflin published Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, which takes readers on a journey through eras of significance. From indigenous tattoos to when tattooing was an upper-class social fad in Europe in the late 19th century—Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of Winston, famously had a tattoo of a snake eating its tail as a symbol of eternity on her wrist—to the surge of women’s interest in tattoos during the fight for women’s suffrage in the 1920s and the feminist 1970s.
In the introduction, Mifflin writes, “Tattoos appeal to contemporary women both as emblems of empowerment in an era of feminist gains and as badges of self-determination at a time when controversies about abortion rights, date rape and sexual harassment have made them think hard about who controls their bodies—and why.”
Indeed, amplified by the #MeToo movement and the controversial overturning of abortion rights in the US, the topic of women’s bodily autonomy is particularly potent today. And some women are taking to their skin to tell the stories of who they are, where they come from and what they have been through.