Customizing the Body (PDF file) - Print My Tattoo

20 Introduction
art. Their social and occupational status is enhanced. they enjoy
greater control over their worklives. and they encounter a new
client pool with sophisticated aesthetic tastes and sufficient
disposable income to purchase extensive custom-designed art
products.
As is the case with stylistic change within other media. new
approaches to tattoo form and content derive from the process
of cultural diffusion (cf.• Bell. 1976: 96; Rosenblum. 1978: 112).
The rich tradition of Japanese tattooing has had a major impact
on contemporary fine art style. The use of stylized background
elements (for example. wind and wave designs) to frame and tie
together foreground images in a form of tattoo mural is a major
consequence of this diffusion. In an interview an internationally
known tattoo artist explained his adoption of oriental style in
this way:
My own work has been ... working toward this (use of existent
imagery!. I seized on the Japanese thing early in my career
because it was the first role model of some kind of articulated
tattooing that had an impact because of its scale and because
of the subject matter and fitting things to body contours as
opposed to the badge motif of most Western tattOOing-the
hodgepodge collection. I approached the Japanese work and
tried. as it were. to create a context for this to occur in the
West.
Similarly. the traditional designs of tribal cultures have had
some impact on contemporary western tattoo style. Drawn largely
from the tattoo tradition of Hawaiian. Maori, Samoan. and other
Pacific Island cultures. this "neo-tribal" stylistic form consists of
solid black. commonly abstract, designs that closely follow body
contours.
THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF
CULTURAL PRODUCTION
All of the forms of body alteration discussed above share a consciously
constructed purpose for those who engage in them. They
are mechanisms of social communication. Most basically. all
forms of body modification involve some measure of decoration;