You get some interesting questions as a woman with tattoos. Examples of things I’ve been asked include “Can I touch it?”, “How will you hide them on your wedding day?” and “Why would you put a bumper sticker on a Bentley?” (To their credit, this was a creative one.)
Shame, promiscuity and undesirability are common associations people have made with women who have chosen to decorate their skin. But many of those women have a very different perspective.
“As a relatively heavily tattooed person, you definitely receive judgement sometimes,” says Akiko Sakai, a model and founder of The Studio, which teaches art and yoga in Hong Kong. “On the flipside, there is so much appreciation, and I would have to say in my experience that the appreciation outweighs the judgement. The perception of women with tattoos is changing in a positive way.”
In 1997, American journalist and author Margot Mifflin published Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, which takes readers on a journey through eras of significance, from indigenous tattoos to when tattooing was an upper-class social fad in Europe in the late 19th century—Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of Winston, famously had a tattoo of a snake eating its tail as a symbol of eternity on her wrist—to the surge of women’s interest in tattoos during the fight for women’s suffrage in the Twenties and the feminist Seventies.
This story is from the July 2022 edition of Tatler Philippines.
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This story is from the July 2022 edition of Tatler Philippines.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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