Tattooed Resilience: Violence and Storied Skin

Project Description:

Tattoos have been around for millennia, from Otzi the Ice Man’s sixty-one tattoos to Ed Hardy’s modern flash designs. Tattoos have been integrated into people’s lives as a deep, personal form of meaning-making. What we mean by this is that individuals may use tattoos to make sense of life events that have happened to them.

Tattooed Resilience came from a larger project on Violence and Resilience funded by SSHRC’s College and Community Social Innovation Fund, in partnership with the Victim Justice Network. Thus, our client is a social innovation project with a community partner.

When reviewing the qualitative data from the interviews of this larger study, there were some compelling narratives about tattoos when the participants shared their stories. Our project investigated the motivations that victims and survivors of violence had for acquiring tattoos related to their victimization, and how tattoos may offer a non-traditional form of healing.

We identified six participants’ interviews that self-disclosed tattoos as related to their victimization. The participant’s victimization history included homicide, domestic abuse, and sexual abuse.

Our analysis involved examining the interviews for prominent themes, and then using themes from previous research on tattoos as a non-traditional method of healing to inform our analysis. The outcome of this work resulted in six main themes: memorialization, communication, autonomy, permanence, self-injury, and spirituality.

The majority of participants acquired tattoos to memorialize loved ones that were homicide victims. One participant had their loved one’s ashes in the ink. Tattoos also allowed participants to communicate their ordeal to others through general inquiry about their tattoo. Another participant noted the word ‘survivor’ being tattooed on them represented reclamation of their autonomy in the aftermath of victimization. Tattoos also helped as a positive coping mechanism to refrain from self-injury, and were connected to participant’s spirituality.

The analysis was challenging for us because there is a lack of literature on tattoos and non-traditional healing. Also, this was the first time we used qualitative methods to analyze interviews. At times, we had concerns about ethical guidelines of confidentiality. It was important to not reveal identifiable information about participants in our work.

Next, we drafted a manuscript of our findings in preparation for a peer-reviewed journal publication, which was also challenging. Writing for publication is not the same as for a school assignment, and we had to learn how to write for academic reviewers.

Currently, we are working on revising our draft to be able to submit to a peer-reviewed journal, with the goal of having our paper published. From the outcomes of the six themes we found, we conclude that tattoos offered a non-traditional form of healing, allowed participants to reclaim their bodies in the aftermath of crime, are an important component of the participant’s narratives, allowed participants to make sense of their ordeal, and are a form of resilience. Thus, there is a need for further research into this field, and society should view non-traditional healing with a more humanistic perspective.

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