We think of tattoos as permanent, and on an individual level it’s true— ink will never leave your skin once it’s found its home in the dermis. Laser treatments and sun exposure might break up the pigments into nearly invisible microscopic pieces, or god forbid your skin could be cut off from your body, but ink stays in skin as long as there is skin to stay in.

Skin, however, is not permanent.

Skin famously sheds itself and fully regenerates multiple times throughout the human lifespan, working around the ink pigments which stay fixed in place through a complex cycle of macrophage replacement and renewal (Baranska et al, 2018). After death, the ink decomposes along with the skin, as all of the body’s contents are broken down by its environment and no immune system exists to hold the pigments in their assigned locations anymore. Unless the skin is promptly removed from the cadaver, carefully embalmed, and placed in a UV protective environment (which modern technology has made possible with three months and few thousand dollars), pigments placed deep in the skin will be taken to one’s grave. Therefore, it is permanent, fulfilling the etymological definition of the word as they “remain through to the end”.

But the common understanding of “permanence” is not limited to any fixed time period. Permanent things last indefinitely, if not forever. Permanence is indelible, fixed, fundamentally unchanging. Using this definition, ink in skin may be permanent, but tattoos, whose appearance change throughout a lifetime, and who last only as long as their human canvas is alive, are not quite as permanent we believe them to be.

In contrast to other popular art forms, tattoos have an inherently limited existence in our world. While a marble sculpture may last thousands of years, tattoos are the only art form which cannot outlive the memory of its creation. In other words, creating a tattoo requires a living human whose body will carry the art piece until death. Since the artist and the human “canvas” must both be alive during the creation of the tattoo, even if the artist dies before the “canvas”, the human “canvas” will hold the tattoo only for the rest of their life. Therefore, when the artist and the “canvas” are dead, the memory of the tattoo’s creation no longer exists and the tattoo (in its intended embodied state) perishes as well.

Broken down in this way, it seems obvious: if the individuals who created the tattoo are gone, then the tattoo must also be gone.

While that might not seem particularly novel at first, but what other material art forms share this trait with tattoos?

Da Vinci is dead, the Mona Lisa is still here; there is no way to know who sculpted Venus of Willendorf, but it still exists; no one alive today has ever met my great-great-grandmother but my cousin wears her ring. One of the reasons that people create art at all is so that something can outlive them, or be passed down and preserved through a stretch of history. When no one is alive who can remember their creation, we are still able to preserve pieces of art, if we choose to do so. Art can then become the material basis of history itself, as we are able interpret art even when we are unable to remember it.

So if tattoos are unlike every other art form in that they cannot outlive the memory of their creation, how can we study the art history of tattoos? What can tattoos offer to society, as an art form, that other material arts cannot?

When it comes to studying art history, tattoos have been excluded from the field for a myriad of reasons. In particular, it is my view that the processes of colonization which have upheld and continue to support major Western art institutions for centuries are the same processes that have stigmatized global tattoo practices, driving many to extinction and allowing only the most profitable innovations in tattooing to survive. The museums which serve as the home base for the study of art history are designed to preserve artifacts within isolated and highly controlled environments. Such spaces are not built to accommodate art that lives on human bodies and is constantly interacting with their surroundings.

Unfortunately, it’s these same spaces and institutions which develop the popular and legal definitions for “art” as we know it in our society. As pieces can be materially preserved and their provenances can be tediously recorded, art history institutions can continue to support their claims over extended periods of time. In this context, artistic objects that are ephemeral, quickly biodegradable, and impossible to isolate are viewed as not dependable, and therefore are not useful for institutions whose goal is to preserve art over time.

Clearly, studying tattoos in an art history context would require much more methodological flexibility and intellectual decolonization than the field has previously been known to offer. So why try to integrate tattoos into academic art studies at all? Because when tattoos are limited to the fields of anthropology, archeology, sociology, and the other social sciences in which they’ve historically been contained, we build an unbalanced and problematically biased view of tattoos. When we don’t study tattoos as art, we continue to perpetuate the idea that tattoos are not worthy of being considered art at all. We continue to reserve the designation of “art” only to work which can be separated from its cultural context, preserved, and interpreted without reference to the memory of its creation.

Put simply, when we don’t study tattoos as art, we don’t value tattoos as art. And, as such, we miss out on a wealth of intellectual conversations, discoveries, and insight.

Tattoos may not be like other art forms in their ability to contribute a material basis for the development of histories, but they are nevertheless able to contribute to society as an art form grounded in their temporal context. Tattoos show what human beings are willing to sacrifice for the sake of communication, cultural preservation, or artistic expression (as argued in my senior capstone here, and as exemplified by Mieko Yamada’s article Westernization and Cultural Resistance in Tattooing Practices in Contemporary Japan). The continuation of tattoo styles require individuals to constantly re-engage and re-evaluate their relationships with the traditions that they choose to embody (see Lars Krutak’s “Cultural Heritage of Tattooing: A Brief History“). Much like oral histories, the work survives through intergenerational listening and actively sacrificing one’s time and labour so that the memory can take hold in a new host. (For more on the connections between oral histories and tattoos, see “Our Bodies, Our Archives” by Storm Garner).

In order for tattoos to be studied and respected as an art form, we need to start understanding how to study them through the lens of memory, especially when the techniques of art history do not satisfy. When we gain respect and appreciation for the art forms that cannot be divorced from their cultural context and preserved within museums or archival institutions, we give those art forms a better chance at surviving. Much work needs to be done, but I personally believe that one of the first steps that we can take as artists or as tattooed people is to trouble the idea that tattoos are permanent at all. After all, your body isn’t permanent, so how could your tattoos be? Art is so much bigger than one body, one mind, or one viewer, and so are tattoos.