TAMARA SANTIBAÑEZ

TATTOOING AS LIBERATION WORK

2021

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“Tattooing can be transformative—a way to create a new version of yourself. A tattoo can be a coping strategy, a manifesto, a bold declaration. Tattoos are armor. Being able to access these types of expression can make us feel more free as individuals, and affirms the values that bring us into ourselves. We both mark and witness these moments for individuals, conjuring temporary autonomous zones and movement towards collective liberation.”

Using the concept of trauma-informed care as a foundation, Tamara Santibañez expands on the vast political potential of tattooing, illuminating the unseen work tattoo artists perform without exception. Underpinning the infinite magic of tattooing is the emotional work that artists often come to fear and avoid. Santibañez argues that tattooing has enormous potential to both empower and disempower its recipients, and that we cannot fully realize its positive potential without first acknowledging the scope of what it accomplishes and supporting ourselves in our abilities and limitations.

Part manifesto, part love letter, part workbook, Could This Be Magic? features toolkit prompts and exercises, practical guidelines around good consent and boundary practices, and ideas for shaping a more ethical industry into the future. This work offers something to all artists from self-taught DIY tattooers to ritual practitioners, apprentices and longtime street shop veterans, from those newly engaging with activism to those who place politics at the forefront of their work. Sourcing quotes from artists from all walks of the industry, Could This Be Magic? is a profound exploration of the radical possibilities of justice-centered tattooing.

Liberation Work

In using the phrase “liberation work” to reconfigure the potential of tattoos, I am asking those of us who engage with the practice
of tattooing to broaden our acceptance of just what tattooing can achieve. Liberation work is any effort towards a more free, just,
and equitable world. I believe that work can begin most effectively within our immediate communities. We have the ability and power to individually as well as collaboratively shape the shifts we wish
to see in our workplaces, leisure time, artistic endeavors, and beyond those into the world at large.

Liberation work more wholly encompasses the practices that
we may not always think of or credit as community organizing
or activism. Liberation work is social and personal praxis that exists outside of academic theory or government institutions. It functions under, within, and around those areas to be sure, but liberation work
is anti-hierarchical and comes from a belief that people should have agency over their own lives. Liberation work extends beyond lifestyle politics. It looks past the notions of personal micro-resistances that
do little to unseat broader structural forces, such as empty virtue signaling or “feel-good” gestures that have little to no real-world impact. It involves lots of unlearning. It considers wider political context even in the most microcosmic of individual action. Liberation work unravels the very fabric of structural inequality, addressing practical and material community needs while simultaneously working to dismantle the inherited prejudices we have taken for granted.

How is tattooing liberation work?

Tattooing is a unique profession in that it invites participation
from all types of people. Unlike other services that are public-facing, tattooing requires power exchange and trust across identity differences. Tattooing has the potential to transcend race, class,
and gender barriers (though these barriers will be discussed more
in depth later). All that is required to get a tattoo is the desire to alter one’s own body, and some type of access—no matter how simple
or crude—to ink and needles. The practice of tattooing a body taps into thousands of years of human practice and ritual. Tattooing has moved fluidly between hand-done and electric methods, do-it-yourself and professional settings, has been done in punk houses, prisons, freight trains, outdoor spaces, and any other setting imaginable. Tattooing is, at its core, unbound by societal norms, and retains, despite its popularity, the power to challenge our ideas of beauty, art, and the self.

Tattooing is a powerful form of metamorphosis. It can mark
a coming of age or a turning point in one’s life. The exchange
of a tattoo with a friend or loved one is a unique and special way to bond. Tattooing can be transformative—a way to create a new version of yourself. A tattoo can be a coping strategy, a manifesto, a bold declaration. Tattoos are armor. Being able to access these types of expression can make us feel more free as individuals, and affirms the values that bring us into ourselves.

All this is to say that I believe in tattooing. Being facilitators
and creators of this experience for people is a significant role to play in the community and world at large. Historically and across cultures, tattoo artists have been perceived and honored as healers as well
as creatives. The shop is a site of community-building and socializing, of information exchange and creative collaboration. Tattoo shops
are often neutral territory in fraught social contexts, where all can
be welcomed.

We do not tattoo in a void—we tattoo in a world that is governed by social forces and structural oppression. As much as tattooing
may want to consider itself an outlaw or outsider culture, the truth
is that we cannot escape or ignore the lived experiences of ourselves or those who sit down to get work done. When we approach this responsibility with intention and clarity, we step into the ability
to facilitate empowerment and healing. In providing an experience where a client is affirmed and treated with respect, we can interrupt the cycles of trauma that they live through in the world at large
and work towards collective justice. We both mark and witness these moments for individuals, conjuring temporary autonomous zones
and movement towards collective liberation.