Tattoos and the Longing-To-Be Another World. Monotheistic Bans vs. Contemporary Tattoo Revival

The theme of belonging is certainly deep-rooted in tattooing practices of the Ancient World. I would like to explore a complementary theme: tattooing as an attempt to include world features on/in the skin and body so as to attune an individual life to the cosmos. Even today, the inscription of signs on the body and the resulting transformations were and are—I think—intended as a sort of proactive means of controlling the world and its dynamics. In a sense, drawing figures on the body is very similar to drawing figures from the stars in the sky, and then using them for divination and the art of foreseeing the future. Writing the body and writing the sky, in other words, are two complementary but phenomenologically inter-related ways of exerting power over the world (or, at least, an attempt and the illusion of succeeding).