Says one tattooist interviewed by ethnographer Clinton R. Sanders during his seven years of field study in the tattoo culture: “I do see that many people get tattooed to say, ‘Who was I before I got into this lost position?’ It’s almost like a tattoo pulls you back to a certain kind of reality about who you are as an individual. A woman will come in and say, ‘I just went through a really ugly divorce. My husband had control of my body and now I have it again. I want a tattoo that says I have the courage to take on the rest of my life.’”

Stalnaker says that although her tattoo was primarily an act of rebellion because her parents didn’t want her to permanently mark herself, she always knew that the tattoo she would get would be her own design. For her, it was important that the tattoo be unique. “It’s all mine,” she says. “No one else has this tattoo, not even close to it.”

Tattoos have their origins in giving people a unique identity. In the 18th century, tattoos on the face, neck, legs and buttocks of New Zealand’s Maori tribe members were a veritable resume of the tattooed person’s social status. Tribe members displayed their family relationships, honors and skills through the placement and design of their tattoos.

However, in other cultures the identity was more punishment than personal expression. Testimony from the Nuremberg trials reveals that World War II Nazi officers registered and tattooed concentration camp prisoners on their arms when the prisoners entered the labor camps. Greeks, Romans and Japanese often tattooed their prisoners and slaves, marking them as undesirables, according to John Gray’s book I Love Mom: An Irreverent History of the Tattoo. Seventeenth-
century Japanese peacekeepers practiced an ancient form of California’s “three strikes” plan: each offense merited a different tattooed line, and by the time three was reached, the lines formed the Japanese character for dog. Artistic tattoos originated in that country as cover-ups for the marks of criminals. These newly designed cover-ups were co-opted as fashion by European tourists in the 1800s and as superstitious protection by British sailors, who tattooed themselves with eyes on their chests to keep watch. Eventually, tattoos became hip with women in Victorian England and members of the American upper class.

Now tattoos are making a comeback in the mainstream, but they haven’t stopped horrifying some as a tribal throwback. Says one of the tattooed people in Sanders’s research: “Sometimes I look at my tattoo and wish I didn’t have it. People look at a tattoo and think you’re real bad—a loose person. But I’m not.”