Embracing female tattoo culture
‘The rose of no man’s land’ was used to describe tattoo imagery of a nurse typically with a rose motif next to her. This became a popular tattoo for soldiers to get as a memory of either the nurse who saved them or for a nurse they may have been dating. Below is our pick of the most recent nurse tattoos circulating on social media…
Bailey
Hugh Sheldon
Jamie Greaves
Civ
Bert Krak
The Swedish artist, Linnéa Sjöberg has been turning DIY tattoos into performance art after a year of travelling around Europe taking photographs of herself and her friends tattooing themselves. The year long project has now culminated in a book called Salong Flyttkartong with the message ‘Act Before Thinking’ where she wants to cultivate irrational chaotic thinking, “that’s the energy in the project, kind of counter-productive. It’s two opposites: act before thinking but it’s going to stay with you for the rest of your life. People need to take a stand point: some people are like, “Yeah, go ahead,” and some back off and don’t want to hear about it, they are so frightened of this idea.”
A somewhat controversial subject and now what some may seem as ‘trendy’ are homemade tattoos but Linnéa delves into the psychology of tattooing yourself and why taking control of your own body is the most powerful tool we have. One of her most powerful tattoos was of the markings a plastic surgeon made on her breasts before having a boob job, “I booked a time at a plastic surgery clinic in Manhattan and asked the doctor to draw the lines that he would follow during a breast enlargement. With those lines I went home and tattooed them in front of the mirror, by myself.”
Linnéa’s book Salong Flyttkartong can be purchased here and she is also exhibiting at the Gallery Steinsland Berliner in Stockholm. More information about her work can be found on her website
We’ve loved watching the Six Nations Rugby this weekend… but more for the tattoo spotting than anything else…
Images from BBC
We are loving the view whilst checking out these beautiful ‘scenery’ tattoos. The nautical style encompasses the view from either a boat or on shore with the landscape traditionally of the sea and sky, sometimes with a bit of a tropical feel to it. We also love the more ‘urban’ take on this with views of skyscrapers and city landscapes…
David Cote
Aaron Ashworth
Enrico Grosso
Edekqwerty
Hannah Louise Clark
Susanna Kumschick, a Swiss anthropologist, has curated an exhibition in Hamburg charting 150 years of body art. “I started with skin, because I really think if you are studying tattooing, you need to look at human skin closely too,” Susanna explains. She believes that the tattoo industry has not been represented enough when discussing anthropology in relation to art and design and after much research she “was surprised that it wasn’t actually a subject in art and design museums until recently.”
Thea Duskin, Untitled 2011
Kumschick discusses how tattoos have been represented throughout history in artists’ work, “They were always inspired by the aesthetics, from early on – the human body has been a subject in art for a long time, and so is painting on the body.”
The artist Fumie Sasabuchi adds tattoos to photographs taken from fashion magazines using traditional motifs taken from the Japanese Yakuza mafia. “Tattooing is more fashionable because we show our skin much more than in the past, so it’s more of a communication medium. We should look at them closely, because it depends where you have them on your body – you’re saying different things by the location you choose. It’s normal to have one today but it’s still a statement if you put one on your face, unlike one on your chest or ankle.” The image below was created from a photograph taken from children’s magazine Vogue Angels.
She also looks at how tattoos can stigmatise certain people. The photographer and filmmaker Christian Poveda spent a year with members of the Mara 18 gang in El Salvador, who cover themselves in tattoos marking the numbers of people they’ve killed or commemorating the death of a fellow gang member.
The exhibition is at MK&G in Hamburg until 6 September 2015.