YOUR TATTOOS ARE PROBLEMATIC.

AuthorWolfe, Liz

SCAR IS A white guy living in Austin, Texas, with a penchant for Japanese-style tattoos. A huge black and white dragon arcs over his left shoulder. The dragon's scales subtly change shape as he moves, and the beast's eyes are beady and glaring, nestled below spiked eyebrows and above bared fangs. The tattoo is lightly shaded, darker around the perimeter of the dragon, with a background of stylized leaves and waves that add depth and complexity to the piece.

What Oscar knows about the origins of Japanese tattooing, he likes: "It's associated with outlaws and outcasts--there were all these merchants and gangsters in Japan that were shunned from the societal hierarchy. Some people think the tradition began as a way for those merchants to show off their wealth privately, and for gangsters to mark themselves as part of a counterculture."

He delayed getting this particular tattoo for a long time, thinking that "it had to have a lot of meaning." But the more time he spent around tattoo artists, the more he "realized it's more about the art--you don't have to 100 percent understand the context to appreciate something."

Oscar asked that his real name not be used for this story, but says he's OK with the "risk" associated with his choice of tattoo. "People might be offended by it, people might be scared by it, and I like that--I like the fact that it can be polarizing or controversial. I ultimately got it because it was something I liked and I didn't feel like I had to justify it beyond that."

According to some figures on the activist left, hoop earrings should only be worn by black and Latina women. Don't even think about donning a feathered headdress at a music festival--those don't belong to you. And if your child wants to dress up as the Disney character Moana for Halloween, beware, unless she's of Polynesian descent. Culture appropriation--co-opting specific elements of a culture that is not your own--is the term used to condemn these offenses. It has become a major battleground for the social justice movement.

But what happens when the ink embedded in your skin is unacceptable to polite society? As a form of public art and personal adornment, tattooing has a long history of cultural borrowing. Some popular tattoos have historical lineages so tangled it's hard to tell who is appropriating whose heritage. For tattoo artists and clients, it may not be easy to separate art from politics, the deeply personal from the public and political.

Every tattoo carries the risk of regret. But in the current ultra-sensitized atmosphere, that regret can set in quickly.

HULA GIRLS

PAUL SMITH AT Bijou Studio in Austin, Texas, has been tattooing for 15 years, specializing in traditional American and Japanese-style tattoos. He's covered in ink, all the way down to his hands, with a large black scorpion reaching close to his fingers.

Sitting outside his clean and well-decorated East Austin shop, tucked between grungy dive bars and new-construction apartment buildings, Smith explains that copying and hybridization are deeply embedded in tattoo history. "Whatever tattoos someone got halfway around the world, that was copied in a sort of cross-pollination," he says. Sailors used to travel from port to...

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