The social life of skin: ethnography of body modification in professional tattoo studios

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse the so-called bodymod or body modification. Through an ethnography of professional tattoo studios, and relying on a methodology based on interviews, observations and photographs, this work maps the social life of skin among contemporary youth. Interrogating the uses and meanings of tattooing, and engaging in dialogue with tattooers and tattooed people, this research discusses the relationship of the body and technology, describes the practices inherent in the “tattoo community”, and scrutinises skin as a material and symbolic surface. Informed by the anthropology of the body, the sociology of consumption and youth studies, the results portray professional studios not only as places of consumption but also as ritual and relational nodes, and present tattooing as an expressive technique that blurs the boundaries of the organic and the technological, giving rise to processes of subjectivation that are tensioned between the individual and the collective.