As possibly the first, and certainly the most obvious, a canvas upon which human differences can be written and read, the skin has been a topic of continuous interest in anthropology and related disciplines from the earliest descriptions of exotic people to postmodern theorizing about the body in contemporary society. Skin, as a visible way of defining individual identity and cultural difference, is not only a highly elaborated preoccupation in many cultures; it is also the subject of wide-ranging and evolving scholarly discourse in the humanities and social sciences.

It is a simple truth that tattooing largely reflects the visual culture from which it emerges, at least in the West. In the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, European pilgrims to the Holy Lands were tattooed with the devotional iconographies of their faith (crosses, Christograms, images of Christ). At the turn of the nineteenth-century, tradesmen marked their skins with signs of their professions and sailors repeated on their bodies the suns, anchors and pierced hearts they carved into tobacco tins and whalebone whilst at sea. In the 1930s, Mickey Mouse appeared on the sheets of pre-drawn designs (“flash”) which tattooists traded amongst themselves and advertised to customers.

The body has long been an integral concept in sociology, whether as a metaphorical tool or a literal construct wherein the individual identity is situated. Classical theorists, particularly Karl Marx, have understood the body as a fundamental element of social structure where the embodied actor must interface directly with society through labour. Maximilian Karl Emil Weber’s themes of domination and power, though intellectually framed as the machinations of a political system, in practice must be exerted upon the physical actor. Theorists such as Paul-Michel Foucault or Pierre Felix Bourdieu have conceptualized the body as a site for examining power dynamics and action, while feminist theorists have posited the body as a location of oppression or liberation.

Although the medical and mental health literatures bemoan the dangers of tattooing as a predictor of deviance and a source of negative sociality, recent research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies reveals the multiple reasons individuals become tattooed in the contemporary United States of America. Analysis of these works shows that many individuals become tattooed to face social-psychological challenges and to exert control over themselves and their lives through the modification of the body. Specifically, the study of contemporary body projects like tattooing illuminates social-psychological concepts regarding the self, including: coping, mastery, self-efficacy, and the construction of the self through life narratives.