thoughts...
The role of the tattooer requires us to straddle the liminal spaces.
Where we hold space for others & allow them also to hold their own.
A space where we guide without manipulating, work as a conduit but also as an Artist with our own ideas & fleshed out thoughts & bodies.
We are of the body & yet we are a vessel.
We work what appears to be the most permanent thing we can do but in reality it is the most impermanent. For doesn’t our body decay and eventually move into the earth or ash?
6/2/21
I have never felt that I tattoo ON skin.
It feels like such a strange thing to my mind. I know of course practically, I am tattooing skin, but as soon as I break skin I am no longer tattooing skin but I am moving into the body.. tattooing within the body.
The skin is a layer to move through to the body.. we don’t tattoo on the body but in it..
Skin is one of the elements, one of the materials we are working with together, along with our individual histories, our cultural backgrounds, our illnesses & disability, our stories that belong to us & sometimes our ancestors..
I prefer explain tattooing as working with the whole body... the big i & the small i.
1/1/21