Steckdaub-Muller, Irmgard
The skin as a creative material: Tattooist’s concepts of the skin as their work object
This paper examines how tattooists conceptualize the skin as their work object. Drawing on the empirical data of a research project, which reconstructs the professional self-understanding of tattoo artists with the Documentary Method (Bohnsack 2001) and metaphor analysis (Schmidt et al. 2018), the study of narrative interviews with tattoo artists of different gender, age, ethnic and social background shows that they represent individual notions of the skin as a material.
Based on a theoretical framework that combines the concept of ‘material consciousness’ as a basic feature of art and crafts work (Sennett 2008) and the body work concept (Gimlin 2007; Wolkowitz 2002) that serves to determine the characteristics of body service work, tattooing is identified as a specific form of creative body work. The interviewed tattooists emphasize that the skin is a work object that involves yearslong study and experience since its handling requires professional knowledge, expertise and not only creative but also technical skills. In this context the skin is categorized as a creative medium that is either interpreted as a (living) surface, a mirror of the inner self, a drawing material or a vivid organ that changes over time. Each of these perceptions interacts with the tattooist’s self-understanding of his/her role as the actor in the tattooing procedure. These findings will be illustrated through chosen empirical data and lead to a conclusion that also touches upon the question whether the concept of the skin that tattooists represent interacts with gender.
Irmgard Steckdaub-Muller, M.A. is a lecturer and doctoral candidate at the Institute of Sociology at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen Nürnberg. Currently, she writes a dissertation on the professional self-understanding of tattoo artists and their self-perception as (creative) professionals. Since 2011 she has been teaching numerous courses on various topics in sociology. From 2017 until 2019 she was a research scientist in a project on body service work, which was funded by the German Research Association. Her research interests include qualitative research, cultural studies, sociology of professionalism and sociology of the body.
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