![]() “Tattooing is a tradition that has been alive and breathed in new life in our generation. In an interview with Welcome to Chinatown, she shares: This coincides with co-founder of Long Time Tattoo Celeste Lai’s words on the connection between tattooing and body reclamation. Indigenous communities across the globe also consider tattooing as a preservation and amplification of cultural integrity and belonging. Every tattoo was a declaration of self: “This is my body.” Similarly, Lacsamana believes that whenever a person gets a tattoo, “You are becoming more ‘I am’-more yourself.” But early in her tattoo journey, she recognized the courage that younger Wiji already had before getting inked, even while hiding. This shifted over time when Lacsamana started choosing body placements that appeared more visible to others. Lacsamana, who is also an illustrator and author, shared that growing up in a Catholic and conservative academic family, she got her tattoos in secret. We gathered to have conversations on tattooing, which began with the topic of body autonomy. One Saturday morning, I had breakfast with tattoo artists Alaga and Wiji Lacsamana at Tattoo Nebula, a tattoo and piercing studio in Manila, Philippines. For others, tattooing is a form of body liberation and healing: Choosing to mark one’s body and determining which designs to be permanently marked with is a reclamation. Tattooing is more than decorative: It is a form of devotion to one’s true self and community.Īrtistically and resolutely, many of the colonized today counteract the violence of cultural and religious erasure by getting inked. Tattooing is medicinal and sacred, symbolizing a person’s great milestones, beauty, and bravery. For most Christians, tattoos are biblically forbidden, with verses like Leviticus 19:28 instructing to “not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves.” The case is vastly different for communities outside the West-especially to Indigenous peoples. The majority of Western cultures and religious traditions have associated tattoos with criminality, primitivity, and other forms of unsophistication. Our bodies carry stories and there are many ways to tell them, with various types of ink and alternatives to paper.įor centuries, tattooing has represented much more than mere aesthetic or a tough facade. personal notes from the evening I got my first tattoo in 2022 Tattooing is a reiteration of “by wounds, am healed.” Symbolized honor, achievement, and beauty. ![]() Tattooing is a holy permanence on my brown skin,Ī deliberate reverence to Indigenous ancestors, whose tattoos While labeling the ink on our skin as dirty and demonic Tattooing is a sacred “fuck you” to colonizers and their attempted erasure of us, As opposed to the ones that violently invaded my being,
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