Tattoos in Singapore

I just grabbed that foto off of Jullieit's deviantart page. According to her page, she is based in Sydney and Hong Kong. The above photo was apparently taken in Singapore.

I love this photo.

It is erotic, collaborative. It features prominently a woman's gaze (of the photographer herself, together with the eyes of the woman in the background), staring at the prominent homoeroticism of the quite quite gorgeous tattoo artist and his subject's body.

The image is also interesting to me because everyone is Asian; The 'counterculture' to Singapore's placid, efficient exterior (though never fully separate from it, of course). The photo is an invitation, or at least a window that we peer through, to witness this intimacy.

The tattoo-ed guy's gaze is averted away from the camera, while there is written upon the tattoo artist's face intense concentration, in a state of flow, his whole body leaning and oriented toward his art, his whole world zoning in on his act-of-inking... mergence of activity between two men enabling One shared activity... Intimate Comradeship? Etching fraternity into flesh.

Postcolonial man-on-man action...

Tattoos as Purpose

Tattoos as a reason to keep on going.

As in: Seriously. Not simply as a 'hobby,' or as an incidental, fortunate possibility of bourgeois excess, true these may well be... but also as a Purpose for Living.

This requires me to conceptualise the Tattoo as legitimate art.
To only see my tattoos as either potential helps or hindrances to getting 'real jobs'... Forget it!
My paid jobs exist to help me survive, sure,
but they also fund that other real goal of my life,
which is to conceptualise and enact Art.

And tattoos can be art which is etched out through a transmutation of an individual's history through triumphs and crises... crises of ecology, gender, capitalism, nation states, sexuality, slavery, nuclear meltdowns, crises of faith, flatulence, and fury.

Tattoos as art, co-created by (at least) two people: The tattoo artist, and the person whose body will become tattooed...
I do not mind parading my own body as a piece of art, a sacred temple;
a temple created not (only) as testament to a deep narcissism (true this may well be)
but also far more deeply as the physical manifestation of an ever-evolving testament to clear, metamorphosis of life's ongoing Vision, which creates (and co-creates) and sacralises as it proceeds...

Tattoo as commitments to progression, passage, recognition of impermanence and integration, wabi-sabi... because I tattoo one or a few things at a time over the passage of my life. Thus, it is a never-ending art project that ends in complete disintegration upon the death of the body... And in the meantime? I may become the strange man with tattoos aplenty, but I will love having this piece of sacred art with me, everywhere I go, till I gasp my last breath.