Typographic Bodytext

Shelley Jackson's Skin project http://ineradicablestain.com/skin-quilt.html is a witty and innovative novel comprised of 2095 'words', each one of which is tattooed onto participants. Volunteers from around the world are sent an individual word, together with its attendant punctuation, and are obliged to tattoo the word they receive on any part of their body in a prescribed 'classic book font', examples of which are 'Caslon, Garamond, Bodoni, and Times Roman...Futura or Gill Sans...Courier' and 'Baskerville'. Jackson stipulates that the 'tattoo should look like something intended to be read, not admired for its decorative qualities', which suggests she generally views tattoos as decoration and not as 'something intended to be read'. This narrow view of reading (explicitly linked to letters, graphs, words here) is, in itself, interesting and perplexing, since, as we know, non-verbal images are equally text-like and almost always produced to be interpreted or 'read'. Even more interesting, however, is the insistence on a 'classic book font', when what is being produced is manuscript, inscribed by hand into the skin. This makes the participants--embodiments of a fractured, dismembered work--living exempla of hybrid technologies. In contrast, the image of my friend's tattoo shown here is a manifestation of multilayered chirographic practice: it is a line from the Old English poem, The Wanderer ('Thus said the wise man in his mind as he sat apart in secret meditation'), written by needle in an emulative Anglo-Saxon Insular Minuscule script, imitating the original tenth-century scribe's work in The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry. It becomes a tattoo simulacrum--a real fake, written into human skin, instead of on animal skin. My friend literally brings the page to life.

To tattoo or not to tattoo

One of the class wrote to me after our Tattoo session yesterday to ask if I thought Henna designs might be considered as tattoos. I replied that in some ways they were, but in our email exchange, it became clear that the overriding characteristic of tattoos is in their Intentionality; that is, they are meant to be permanent, even if, through considerable laser treatment, they can be erased, creating a palimpsest of the body. As far as a tattoo's materiality is concerned, it is the embedding of ink under the skin that provides that permanence, and this is quite different, of course, from body-painting. It is this breaking of the skin and embedding of substance that aligns tattoos with piercings. Ultimately, of course, tattoos and any other form of 'permanent' body text are evanescent, transient, ephemeral.
From the functional perspective, tattoos are both private and public in nature. Some are literally so, because you cannot see them, unless the person chooses to show you. Some are intellectually private, in that their meaning is not obvious. This might be because of the language in which the tattoo is written (as in the textual examples here, http://www.englisc-gateway.com/bbs/topic/25675-anglo-saxon-early-english-tattoo-designs/), or because the immediate reference is obscure. The ways in which viewers or readers of the body react to the tattoo is another aspect of functionality: how do tattoos function in the world, and is the tattoee's intention sometimes to shock? It is this former aspect of tattooing--the counter-hegemonic, the rebellious--that might parallel the more public act of writing graffiti.