The reading for this upcoming class was honestly devastating. I was always aware of people getting tattoos as a reaction to a traumatic event in their life, but I see now that I underestimated the number of forms that could take. I always saw them as personal, something close to the tattooed person, and while that is true, it is not all there is to it. The reading on Hurricane Katrina tattoos showed that tattoos meant to symbolize a traumatic event can be shared as well, that there is a community stored within these tattoos. In the reading, a tattoo became a shared point of remembrance as it became a gateway for people to share their own stories as they recognized the symbol that was on the man’s leg. From there comes a community. Even without explicitly saying anything, there are people that will understand what a traumatic tattoo holds from just the mark itself and I believe that even just knowing that someone understands can create a sense of community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In terms of the presentation for this week’s class, I decided to find tattoos that aimed to cover up self harm scars. These scars represent something traumatic to the vast majority that have them, a reminder of a time when they were in a darker mental state. Because of this, some choose to cover them with tattoos. These tattoos also made me think of the reading in that the pain of the tattoo is a necessary part of the healing process, that something had to be done to the spot that represents the trauma for it to be overcome in a sense. In addition to this, I also thought of my research topic. This was because one of the tattoo artists I found that did a self harm cover up tattoo is based in South Korea. It was interesting to think about the interplay of these two things, tattooing and self harm scars, that are supposed to fall under medical jurisdiction, yet fail to find anything of value there. What I mean is that tattooing in South Korea requires a medical license, but most do not, instead going underground and using other methods to book clients and have spaces to tattoo and it is interesting to see this version of tattooing be intertwined with something pertaining to mental health, which is also supposed to fall under the jurisdiction of medical professionals, but fails to gain validity as an actual issue in South Korea. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The reading for this upcoming class was honestly devastating. I was always aware of people getting tattoos as a reaction to a traumatic event in their life, but I see now that I underestimated the number of forms that could take. I always saw them as personal, something close to the tattooed person, and while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11790,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11790"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":672,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions\/672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar473-fall2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}