Customizing the Body (PDF file) - Print My Tattoo

209 Notes to Chapter 2
which five members of a local college football team acquired identical tattoos
on their hips:
[Quote from fieldnotes] I ask the guy nearest to me if they are all
getting work done. “Yeah. He (indicates friend) was so hot for it he
would have done it himself if we couldn’t get it done today.” (You
all getting hip shots?) “Yeah, that’s where all jocks get them. The
coach would shit if he found out.” The conversation among the
jocks turns to the issue of pain. They laugh as the guy being
worked on grimaces as W (artist) finishes the outline and wipes the
piece down with alcohol. The client observes that this experience
isn’t bad compared to the time “I fucked up my hand in a game and
had to have steel pins put in the knuckles. One of them got bent
and the doctor had to cut it out. That was bad. I got the cold
sweats.” Some of the others join in by telling their “worst pain I ever
experienced” stories. The guy being worked on is something of a
bleeder and the others kid him about this. As W begins shading one
of them shouts, “Come on, really grind it in there.”
The cross-cultural literature on body alteration indicates that the pain of
the process is an important factor. Ebin (1979: 88–89), for example, in discussing
tattooing in the Marquesas Islands, states:
The tattoo was not only an artistic achievement: it also demonstrated
that its recipient could bear pain. On one island, the word to
describe a person who was completely covered with tattoos is
ne’one’o, based on a word meaning either “to cry for a long time”
or “horrific.” One observer in the Marquesas noted that whenever
people discussed the tattoo design, they emphasized the pain with
which it was acquired.
See also Brain, 1979: 183–184; Ross and McKay, 1979: 44–49, 67–69;
Becker and Clark, 1979: 10, 19; St. Clair and Govenar, 1981: 100–135.
9. Other than simply accepting the regretted mark, there are few
avenues of resolution open to dissatisfied tattooers. In the most extreme
cases, the tattooed may try to obliterate the offending mark with acid or
attempt to cut it off. A somewhat more reasoned (and considerably less
painful) approach entails seeking the aid of a dermatologist or plastic surgeon
who will medically remove the tattoo. The most common alternative,
however, is to have the technically inferior piece redone or covered with
another tattoo created by a more skilled practitioner. Tattooists estimate
that 40 to 50 percent of their work entails reworking or applying coverups
to poor quality tattoos. See Goldstein et al., 1979, and Hardy, 1983.
10. One traditional use of tattooing has been to mark indelibly social
outcasts and defined deviants so that they can be easily identified and/or
avoided by officials and “normals.” In sixth-century Japan, for example,
criminals and social outcasts were tattooed on the face or arms as a form