Spilled Ink

More women than ever are getting tattooed. And for many, it’s a way to reclaim their culture and identity, revive traditions abolished by colonisation, and transform scars into works of art

- Coco Marett

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.