Each of these artworks expands the role of the tattoo beyond historically localized cultural practices into a medium well positioned to address poignant global issues such as immigration reform and the rise of nationalism in the twenty-first century.
I argue that cartographic tattoos prompt discussions of bodily mobility, marginality, nationalism, liminality, borderlines, (in)visibility, unity, and division. Using these pieces, I interrogate the role of tattooed cartographies as embodiments of human displacement, disrupted notions of homeland, and shifting conceptual boundaries by virtue of their location on the body’s own boundary: skin. I look to Qin Ga’s tattooed map of China The Miniature Long March (2002-2005), Wafaa Bilal’s 2010 borderless tattooed map of Iraq …and counting, and Douglas Gordon’s film Portrait of Janus (Divided States) from 2017 as examples of this emerging trend. In recent years, several contemporary artists have expanded this anthropological interpretation and materialized the tattoo’s global relationship to geography and cultural memory through the creation of tattooed maps. Claude Lévi-Strauss pioneered this approach in his seminal text Structural Anthropology (1963), positioning Maori tattooing as an integral element of social interaction and cultural cohesion, simultaneously indicative of the individual and the “philosophy of the group.” This understanding of the medium has resulted in tattoo scholarship that is regional, focused on bodily markings as indications of an individual’s position within particular societies. As a global phenomenon, anthropologists and ethnographers have historically examined tattooing through a lens of localized, culturally-constructed meaning.
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