Identity and Popular Culture Tattoos

Near the end of July this year, Katie Ode, a woman from Angsley, made some headlines by getting a tattoo of one of the stars of Love Island.

Love Island, for those outside of the reality television loop, is a British reality show where loads of gorgeous and young single people live in a villa in Spain for the summer with the intention of finding someone to love by the end of the show. Contestants are asked to “couple up”, and they spend all day together and even share a bed together. The show is released every day in the summer, where viewers are able to vote on what happens to the individuals in the villa. Love Island is a classic reality show which uses many common tropes in the genre, and combines it in a way which makes for great television. It became so popular that branches of the show have spread to other countries, including the United States and Australia, and there will soon to be a second spin of the British version to air from South Africa in January.

Chris Taylor was a prominent favourite contestant in the latest series, despite arriving in the villa relatively late. He became known for his humour and his strange sense of fashion, including a blue kimono and a towel wrapped around his head. Katie Ode’s tattoo captured this fashion moment, depicting Chris with a towel on his head and two pairs of glasses.

  In an article on ITV, Ode said this image of Chris “represented a mood”. She said, “So Chris was my favourite by far. I loved the way he was very open to his emotions and he was just hilarious... So I went to TattooLand in Benidorm and the guy looked at me as if I was a bit nuts!”

 And perhaps the tattooist is not the only person currently thinking she is a bit crazy. I can imagine quite a few of you readers are in the same position at the moment. But this post is in part a defence of a tattoo like this, but more importantly is going to discuss popular culture tattoos in general. Part of this stems from my own experience of getting a popular culture tattoo. My first tattoo was the words from the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings, wrapped around my upper left arm. While the tattoo was in progress, my tattooist assumed this was not first. When I told him it was, he was surprised, and told me, “Most people get something meaningful for their first tattoo.”

Perhaps people will have an easier time accepting the Lord of the Rings as meaningful rather than Love Island. But what’s something in between we can also use as an example? Maybe… video games? During fieldwork for my Masters on the Legend of Zelda series, I encountered many people who had Legend of Zelda tattoos. In fact, I’ve encountered many Zelda tattoos even outside of my fieldwork, with people eager to tell me of either theirs or their partners’ at different events when my research is revealed, and has even occurred at academic conferences. More specifically, I find people explaining what they have tattooed on them, where it is, and why for both. There was one who had a Triforce on the inside of their wrist, which they claimed was useful for remembering to live each life with an equal amount of power, wisdom and courage. Others explain having the Master Sword with a memory of first finding the Master Sword in whichever game was of most consequence to them.

 In each of these instances, the tattoo is directly related to an understanding of self. Pierre Bourdieu’s famous work Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) discusses how the body is socially and historically constructed. This is directly related to the habitus: the ways in which our dispositions, habits, and skills are ingrained in us, and how the social world and ourselves perceive these and react to them. Habitus is a popular sociological and anthropological theory which as impacted our understanding of people and how they interact with one another. Definitely more could be said about habitus than will be here, but that would be not only taking us far outside our purposes for today, but would be, quite frankly, boring. The most important part of the habitus for our purposes today is an understand of how the social affects the body. The idea that our bodies, this physical thing, can be “socially constructed” may seem incredibly strange. By social construction of the body, he means something beyond just the physical attributes. Our understanding of our bodies is impacted by the social world around us. What is considered beautiful, for instance, is inherently related to social, cultural and historical context. For example, there was once a time in European history where the idea of thin and tan being considered culturally beautiful, as it is now, would have been ludicrous. Thin and tan meant you laboured for work. Pale and chubby meant you didn’t, and therefore was considered more attractive.

 But social construction of the body can mean other things as well. Using our bodies, we can communicate with the social world around us about who we are. Fashion, for instance, is a great example of this. You can tell a lot about someone’s personality based on what their fashion choices are. Teenagers tend to discover this and experiment with it. This is why everyone has had strange phases in their life that may seem vastly different to who they are today; they experimented with wearing certain clothes, dying their hair maybe, and seeing how society reacts to them differently.

 Fashion, of course, can be chosen and altered to suit the social response the individual wishes. I dress differently when attending conferences than when I teach, and both are vastly different than how I dress when going on a date with my husband. A more complicated version of the social construction of the body are aspects that cannot change, or at least can but through vast amounts of effort and/or money. These are aspects such as gender and race, which can vastly alter how a society views and treats you as an individual. These can also change how the individual interacts with society as well. Again, much more can be said on the social construction of gender. In fact, many people have explored this concept in a much fuller and more interesting way than I ever can. The purpose of our discussion today is not to broach the topic of these representations of the body, but I did feel it important to note these aspects as well. Rather, we’re going to focus on a choice, like fashion, but one that is permanent: the tattoo.

 Our bodies, being the canvas in which society has metaphorically written their own understandings of us on it, can also be literally written upon. Here, we can write our own messages that society is forced to read. Our bodies become the nexus of a network of social signification – the meeting point of outward society, closer social networks, and our own understandings. These various social groups have overlapping elements, impacted by the larger cultural and historical contexts which encapsulates them. But they sometimes contain differences: a subculture (our closer social network, perhaps) may be reacting against the larger outward social majority; it cannot exist without the larger cultural context which they are reacting against, but still actively attempts to question through existence.

Jane Caplan, in her edited volume Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, writes that “the tattoo occupies a kind of boundary status on the skin. And this is paralleled by its cultural use as a marker of difference, an index of inclusion and exclusion”. Therefore, we can enact a form of agency on the social construction of our body by using it to be a literal demonstration of our own social identity. We utilize this as a process of self-identification, which is explored through a process of categorization. This is not as bad as it sounds: various categories make up the way we think and understand the world. The tattoo allows us to demonstrate to wider society which category we view ourselves as fitting within.

 Self-identification itself is a constant process of becoming, a constant transformation which never solidifies in finality. Tattooing becomes a way in which we establish identity, regardless of the permanency. In a documentary produced and created by Rooster Teeth, Geoff Ramsey, a heavily tattooed co-founder of the company, discussed the idea of regretting tattoos later in life. After telling the story of his first tattoo of the Black Flag’s logo, he says, “I love my Black Flag tattoo, even though its easily my worst tattoo, because it reminds me of what it felt like to be that age.” Another interviewee on the documentary stated: “I don’t think you should ever regret a tattoo. Even if it was a crazy, drunken night, it meant something to you at that time.”

 The tattoo, therefore, locates individuals to particular localities at particular times in history – tattooing anchors an individual’s sense of self through the process of body modification. It provides a moment of self-identification, which – although the self-identification may change over time – becomes a part of the self and the part of a physical demonstration of the past self which makes the current self.

 So now to return to my own Lord of the Rings tattoo. I chose the tattoo based on my relationship with the Lord of the Rings – both on a personal level and a professional. It represents the moment I began to understand my own personal trauma, but it also represented the moment I learned to explore the relationship of religion and popular culture. The tattoo is therefore not simply an interest in Tolkien, although this is also fully an element of my interest in it. It also represents the various times in my life Tolkien has seemingly intervened. Even for those tattoos which people get just because they’re interesting art pieces, they still mean something as a solidification of themselves in that moment of time.

 So let’s revisit Katie Ode and her amazing tattoo of Chris Taylor from Love Island. The call of “but you’ll regret that” may now be re-understood. Even if Ode eventually grows to dislike Love Island, the tattoo will be a reminder of herself, a physical representation of her past interests and what once meant something significant to her. She, in this moment, is seeing herself as needing to utilize tattoos as a process of self-identification, of demonstrating, on her skin, the location of her own self-understanding. It locates her at a time in her life when embracing someone who “shows their emotions”, as Chris was described, was important to her, and also in Benidorm when she was on holiday. Her tattoo also reacts against the observers who, in the social majority, react strongly to the representation as something to be ashamed of.

 So I say, Katie Ode, embrace your inner two-glasses wearing, towel wrapped around the head, diva of a Chris Taylor. Know your current self, and know you’re included in my social circle.