Tattoos

piece on thomas hooper in the guardian today..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/23/tattoo-artists-new-york

Oh gosh, that bloke "terua" is really obsessed with white skin, isn't he? Too much racism for me, thanks.

This analysis is shallow. sailors didn't invent tattooing, they picked it up from the people they colonised and murdered. it had a lot more significance to white society than just fashion. I read something very interesting about tattooing and white skin in a book called 'transitional whiteness matters' people should read it. It might be on google-books, editor is Aileen Moreton Robinson. The way some white people still today react to tattoos with horror or disgust is to do with their feelings about the purity of** white** skin defiled with non-white ink and more complex issues of white identity and colonialism. Although it is true white skin doesn't look as nice, they do sometimes look tacky.

The beachcombers returned to 'civilization' and wrote books about their tattoos, they sold their stories that's the point they had to produce a narrative white society wanted to buy. Their stories and the pornographic stories of kidnapped** white** women revealed the attitudes of wider society. It is about what tattooing and means to society not what you mean to yourself. Whiteness has changed over the centuries, it is interesting white people are getting tattooed now when **whiteness **is insecure and white skin is no longer, or not much longer, a mark of superiority. I think it is interesting, the outraged reaction of some people to tattoos and your outraged reaction to my comment also reveal a lot.