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Contemporary Western Tattooing as an Inherently Collaborative Practice: The Contingent Authorial Input and Operational Mode of the Tattooist

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Tattooed Bodies

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body ((PSFB))

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Abstract

Contemporary western tattooing can be understood as transactional in nature, requiring a paying client to utilize the services of a professional practitioner, in the production of a tattoo outcome. The growing tattoo marketplace results in a variety of clientele, with practitioners utilizing the medium in a range of ways. Much of the academic literature focuses on the tattoo outcome and its significance from the perspective of the client, with limited attention paid to tattoo production, from the perspective of the practitioner. Drawing from my professional tattooing practice, this chapter presents the processes of tattoo production as inherently collaborative between practitioner and patron. A framework for understanding the shifting degree of authorial input of the tattooist is proposed, highlighting that collaboration remains consistently present. By better understanding the collaborative nature of practice, a more informed discourse surrounding how tattoos can be “read” may emerge.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jane Caplan, ed., Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, 1st Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  2. 2.

    Margaret E. Hellard, C. K. Aitken, and J. S. Hocking, “Tattooing in Prisons—Not Such a Pretty Picture,” American Journal of Infection Control 35, no. 7 (2007): 477–80.

  3. 3.

    Yumiko Sasaki and Hajime Matsumine, “Modified Medical Tattooing Techniques in Nipple-Areola Complex Reconstruction,” Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Global Open 6, no. 9 (2018): 1–2, https://doi.org/10.1097/GOX.0000000000001926.

  4. 4.

    Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Mau Moko: The World of Maori Tattoo (New Zealand: Penguin Books, 2011).

  5. 5.

    Göran Larsson, “Islam and Tattooing: An Old Question, a New Research Topic,” Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 23 (2011): 237–56.

  6. 6.

    Anna Felicity Friedman et al., The World Atlas of Tattoo, ed. Anna Felicity Friedman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 27.

  7. 7.

    Friedman et al., 2.

  8. 8.

    David C. Lane, “Tat’s All Folks: An Analysis of Tattoo Literature: Tat’s All Folks,” Sociology Compass 8, no. 4 (2014): 398–410, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12142.

  9. 9.

    Lane, 407.

  10. 10.

    Clinton Sanders, Customizing the Body: The Art and Culture of Tattooing (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989).

  11. 11.

    Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community, vol. 21 (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000).

  12. 12.

    Michael Atkinson, Tattooed: The Sociogenesis of a Body Art (Toronto., Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2003).

  13. 13.

    Lee Barron, Tattoo Culture: Theory and Contemporary Contexts (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

  14. 14.

    Paul Sweetman, “Anchoring the (Postmodern) Self? Body Modification, Fashion and Identity,” Body & Society 5, no. 2–3 (1999): 51–76, https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X99005002004; Mary Kosut, “Tattoo Narratives: The Intersection of the Body, Self-identity and Society,” Visual Sociology 15, no. 1 (2000): 79–100, https://doi.org/10.1080/14725860008583817; Dannie Kjeldgaard and Anders Bengtsson, “Consuming the Fashion Tattoo,” Advances in Consumer Research 32, no. 1 (2005): 172–77; Kristina Sundberg and Ulrika Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” Journal of Documentation 74, no. 1 (2018): 18–35, https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-03-2017-0043.

  15. 15.

    Antony J. Puddephatt, William Shaffir, and Steven W. Kleinknecht, eds., “Colorful Writing: Doing and Living with a Tattoo Ethnography,” in Ethnographies Revisited: Constructing Theory in the Field (London; New York: Routledge, 2009), 66.

  16. 16.

    Mary Kosut, “An Ironic Fad: The Commodification and Consumption of Tattoos,” The Journal of Popular Culture 39, no. 6 (2006): 1035–48; Maurice Patterson and Jonathan Schroeder, “Borderlines: Skin, Tattoos and Consumer Culture Theory,” Marketing Theory 10, no. 3 (2010): 253–67, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470593110373191; Kjeldgaard and Bengtsson, “Consuming the Fashion Tattoo.”

  17. 17.

    TTTism and Nick Schonberger, TTT: Tattoo: A Book by Sang Bleu, 1st edition (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2018), 495.

  18. 18.

    Tingting Windy Wang, “Empowering Art Teaching and Learning with IPads,” Art Education 71, no. 3 (2018): 52, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2018.1436353.

  19. 19.

    In Valhalla Vale and Andrea Juno, Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment & Ritual., Re/Search: 12 (San Francisco, CA: Re/Search Publications; Enfield: Subterranean Company, 1989, 1989), 66.

  20. 20.

    Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 78.

  21. 21.

    Matt Lodder, “Body Art: Body Modification as Artistic Practice” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Reading, 2010), 130.

  22. 22.

    Alan B. Govenar, “Culture in Transition: The Recent Growth of Tattooing in America,” Anthropos 76, no. 1/2 (1981): 216–19; Kosut, “An Ironic Fad”; Michael Rees, “From Outsider to Established-Explaining the Current Popularity and Acceptability of Tattooing,” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 41, no. 3 (2016): 157–74.

  23. 23.

    Barron, Tattoo Culture, 105.

  24. 24.

    Clinton Sanders and D. Angus Vail, Customizing the Body: The Art and Culture of Tattooing, Rev. and expanded ed (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008), 107.

  25. 25.

    McDade, “The Contemporary Western Tattooist as a Multifaceted Practitioner,” Craft Research 10, no.2 (2019): 266, https://doi.org/10.1386/crre_00005_1.

  26. 26.

    Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 1st Edition (London; New York: Berg Publishers, 2007).

  27. 27.

    Adamson, 9–100.

  28. 28.

    Adamson, 13.

  29. 29.

    Adamson, 9–100.

  30. 30.

    Mary-Anne Mace and Tony Ward, “Modeling the Creative Process: A Grounded Theory Analysis of Creativity in the Domain of Art Making,” Creativity Research Journal 14, no. 2 (April 1, 2002): 192, https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326934CRJ1402_5.

  31. 31.

    Barron, Tattoo Culture; Katherine Irwin, “Saints and Sinners: Elite Tattoo Collectors and Tattooists as Positive and Negative Deviants,” Sociological Spectrum 23, no. 1 (January 1, 2003): 27–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/02732170309206.

  32. 32.

    Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Readings in Economic Sociology, ed. Nicole Woolsey Biggart (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002), 280–91, https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470755679.ch15.

  33. 33.

    Barron, Tattoo Culture, vii.

  34. 34.

    Lauren Tan, “Understanding the Different Roles of the Designer in Design for Social Good. A Study of Design Methodology in the DOTT 07 (Designs of the Time 2007) Projects” (Ph.D. thesis, Newcastle upon Tyne, University of Northumbria, 2012), 46, https://core.ac.uk/reader/9989032.

  35. 35.

    Philip G. C. Whiting, “If Designers Are Problem Solvers: What Is a ‘Real’ Problem, A Problem for Whom?,” Design Principles & Practice: An International Journal 5, no. 3 (March 2011): 553, https://doi.org/10.18848/1833-1874/CGP/v05i03/38071.

  36. 36.

    Victor Margolin, “The Age of Communication: A Challenge to Designers,” Design Issues 10, no. 1 (1994): 67, https://doi.org/10.2307/1511657.

  37. 37.

    David Bowie, Heroes (Germany: RCA, 1977).

  38. 38.

    Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (UK: Macmillan, 1865).

  39. 39.

    Jill Grant and Frank Fox, “Understanding the Role of the Designer in Society,” Journal of Art & Design Education 11, no. 1 (1992): 79, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-8070.1992.tb00689.x.

  40. 40.

    Sweetman, “Anchoring the (Postmodern) Self?”; Hannah Roggenkamp, Andrew Nicholls, and Joseph M Pierre, “Tattoos as a Window to the Psyche: How Talking about Skin Art Can Inform Psychiatric Practice,” World Journal of Psychiatry 7, no. 3 (September 22, 2017): 148–58, https://doi.org/10.5498/wjp.v7.i3.148.

  41. 41.

    Nikki Sullivan, Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, and Pleasure (Westport: Praeger, 2001), 17.

  42. 42.

    Janet S. Fedorenko, Susan C. Sherlock, and Patricia L. Stuhr, “A Body of Work: A Case Study of Tattoo Culture,” Visual Arts Research 25, no. 1 (1999): 105–14; Mary Kosut, “The Artification of Tattoo: Transformations within a Cultural Field,” Cultural Sociology 8, no. 2 (July 18, 2013): 142–58, https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975513494877.

  43. 43.

    Maurice Patterson, “Tattoo: Marketplace Icon,” Consumption, Markets & Culture 21, no. 6 (December 2018): 582–89, https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2017.1334280; Rees, “From Outsider to Established-Explaining the Current Popularity and Acceptability of Tattooing.”

  44. 44.

    McDade, “The Contemporary Western Tattooist as a Multifaceted Practitioner.”

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

  • Rees, Michael. “From Outsider to Established-Explaining the Current Popularity and Acceptability of Tattooing.” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 41, no. 3 (2016): 157–74.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roggenkamp, Hannah, Andrew Nicholls, and Joseph M. Pierre. “Tattoos as a Window to the Psyche: How Talking about Skin Art Can Inform Psychiatric Practice.” World Journal of Psychiatry 7, no. 3 (September 22, 2017): 148–58. https://doi.org/10.5498/wjp.v7.i3.148.

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    Google Scholar 

  • Sanders, Clinton, and D. Angus Vail. Customizing the Body: The Art and Culture of Tattooing. Rev. and Expanded ed. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sasaki, Yumiko, and Hajime Matsumine. “Modified Medical Tattooing Techniques in Nipple-Areola Complex Reconstruction.” Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Global Open 6, no. 9 (2018): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1097/GOX.0000000000001926.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schön, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sullivan, Nikki. Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, and Pleasure. Westport: Praeger, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sundberg, Kristina, and Ulrika Kjellman. “The Tattoo as a Document.” Journal of Documentation 74, no. 1 (2018): 18–35. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-03-2017-0043.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sweetman, Paul. “Anchoring the (Postmodern) Self? Body Modification, Fashion and Identity.” Body & Society 5, no. 2–3 (1999): 51–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X99005002004.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tan, Lauren. “Understanding the Different Roles of the Designer in Design for Social Good. A Study of Design Methodology in the DOTT 07 (Designs of the Time 2007) Projects.” Ph.D. Thesis, University of Northumbria, 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • TTTism, and Nick Schonberger. TTT: Tattoo: A Book by Sang Bleu. 1st edition. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2018.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vale, Valhalla, and Andrea Juno. Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment & Ritual. Re/Search: 12. San Francisco, CA: Re/Search Publications; Enfield: Subterranean Company, 1989.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wang, Tingting Windy. “Empowering Art Teaching and Learning With iPads.” Art Education 71, no. 3 (May 2018): 51–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2018.1436353.

  • Whiting, Philip G. C. “If Designers Are Problem Solvers: What Is a ‘Real’ Problem, A Problem for Whom?” Design Principles & Practice: An International Journal 5, no. 3 (March 2011): 553–62. https://doi.org/10.18848/1833-1874/CGP/v05i03/38071.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. RMIT Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Adam McDade

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  1. Adam McDade
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Correspondence to Adam McDade .

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  1. Languages and Literature, Lyon College, Batesville, AR, USA

    James Martell

  2. Division of Medical Humanities and Bioethics, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, NY, USA

    Erik Larsen

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McDade, A. (2022). Contemporary Western Tattooing as an Inherently Collaborative Practice: The Contingent Authorial Input and Operational Mode of the Tattooist. In: Martell, J., Larsen, E. (eds) Tattooed Bodies. Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86566-5_3

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