Are tattoo designs the answer for Berlin's struggling fine artists?

A new initiative is selling contemporary art you can etch into your skin.

- Philip Oltermann

It may be the oldest art form in the world, practised 5,000 years ago by Ötzi the iceman and his fellow copper age Europeans. But with its more recent associations with red-light entertainment and gangland crime, modern tattooing has long been shunned by the galleries that turn lines on canvas into financial assets.

A new initiative in Berlin concedes that the tables have turned. With tattoo studios booming but many artists struggling to make a living, the Works on Skin project specialises in selling works by established and emerging contemporary artists that are not to be hung on a wall but etched on the human body. "The art market has frozen up and many studios are suffering," said the scheme's initiator, Holm Friebe. "So we tried to think about how we can unlock new fields for artistic practitioners and thus repair a broken market."

Via its website, Works on Skin sells artwork in numbered limited editions of 100, initially for €100 each but reaching up to €2,000 for the last remaining numbers.

With their purchase, buyers acquire a signed fine-art print of the artwork and a certificate that gives them the one-off right to have it tattooed on their skin, thus "realising" an art-work that until that point is considered "work in limbo".