SPIRITUAL TATTOOINGAuthor(s): Marie A.

Pagliarini
Source: Journal of Religion and Violence , Vol. 3, No. 2 (2015), pp. 189-212
Published by: Philosophy Documentation Center

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26671461

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 SPIRITUAL TATTOOING: PAIN,
MATERIALIZATION, AND TRANSFORMATION

Marie A. Pagliarini
Saint Mary’s College of California

Abstract: This essay utilizes information gathered through in-depth interviews with
people living in the San Francisco Bay Area to shed light on the phenomenon of
spiritual tattooing—the practice of giving spiritual meaning to tattoos and to the
process of tattooing. The essay analyzes the role of the body, voluntary pain, and
marking the body in the context of religious experience and expression, and high-
lights the connections between spiritual tattooing and practices of self-violence.
Spiritual tattoos work through an inside-out/outside-in mechanism. The process of
tattooing draws abstract or overwhelming interior elements (thoughts, emotions,
memories) out and materializes them through the infliction of pain. At the same
time, things of desire outside the self (spiritual ideals, healing symbols, conceptions
of a new self) are conveyed into the body through the process of painful inscrip-
tion. Through the pain of tattooing and the marks left in the skin, abstractions are
made concrete and real, shaping identity, memory, and spirituality.

Key Words: Tattooing; Body Modification; Embodiment; Materialization; Self-

inflicted Pain; Self-directed Violence; Trauma; Memory; Identity

M any people living in the San Francisco Bay Area have tattoos, and for
some, they hold spiritual meaning. This essay explores the phenomenon
of spiritual tattooing—the practice of giving spiritual meaning to tattoos and to
the process of tattooing—to shed light on the role of the body, voluntary pain,
and marking the body in the context of religious experience and expression.
Spiritual tattooing is a fascinating form of contemporary spirituality, and it
involves complex embodied experiences that are central to the significance
and function of tattoos. As one person explained, “the process is part of the
product, but the world doesn’t see that—the world sees only one time slice.”
Within culture in general, and among tattooed people in particular, tattoo-
ing is not thought of as “self-violence,” yet it shares features with practices

© 2015. Journal of Religion and Violence  3:2. ISSN 0738-098X. pp. 189–212
doi: 10.5840/jrv201581012

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190 JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND VIOLENCE

that could be considered as such—the infliction of pain, permanent marks to

the body, and powerful corporeal experiences meant to alter subjectivity and
communicate meaning to the self and others. This essay utilizes information
gathered through in-depth interviews to analyze the effects of pain and mark-
ing the body in spiritual tattooing, with attention to the connections between
tattooing and practices of self-violence. The analysis also relates to other
forms of body modification, such as piercing, branding, and scarification.
For the purpose of this study, I have drawn heavily (but not singularly) from
interviews with people who have tattooed in response to traumatic personal
events. Their experiences with tattooing may be compared in fruitful ways
to those of people who inflict pain or injury on the self in response to other
forms of trauma or ideals/events that are seen as so overwhelming, abstract,
or meaningful that they require materialization in the body in some form. This
essay focuses on the significance of tattooing for individuals personally; the
social functions of tattoos are critical to their meaning, though constraints of
space do not permit an exploration of the issue here.1
This essay is part of a larger project on tattooing and spirituality and is
based on twenty one-hour interviews conducted in the San Francisco Bay
Area—one of the centers of the “tattoo renaissance” (Rubin 1988a).2 There is
a significant corpus of scholarly literature on tattooing, with studies exploring
the practice in cross-cultural contexts, its traditional and religious meanings,
and its relationship to culture and society (Blanchard 1991; Caplan 2000;
DeMello 2000; Featherstone 2000; Fisher 2002; Gell 1993; MacCormack
2006; Pitts 2003; Rubin 1988a; Schildkrout 2004; Sweetman 1999a, 1999b).
While a handful of works treat the connections between tattooing and spiri-
tuality in the contemporary U.S. context, few devote sustained attention to
this topic from a cultural or religious studies perspective.3

1
I would like to express my gratitude for the generous support of the Office of Faculty
Development and for the guidance of members of the Institutional Research Board, both
at Saint Mary’s College of California. I extend a particular note of thanks to Mary McCall
for her academic and personal assistance, especially when I was in the initial stages of
planning the project and working through the logistics of conducting interviews. I’d also
like to thank Linda Granko for her patience, professionalism, and much-needed assistance
with all matters related to expenses. Finally, I am deeply grateful to the 20 individuals
who agreed to meet for an interview and shared with me their stories.
2
According to Rubin, the “tattoo renaissance” began in the 1950s, and involved the
increased popularity of tattooing among a new and diverse set of people, tattoo shops
as sites of a new subculture, and increased emphasis on artistry, aesthetics, and cultural
borrowing in tattoo designs.
3
Works that address the connections between tattooing and spirituality are Beaudoin
2000; Jenson, Flory, and Miller 2000; Pike 2001; Taylor 1998.

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 SPIRITUAL TATTOOING: PAIN, MATERIALIZATION, AND TRANSFORMATION 191

For the current project, I posted fliers in various locations in Oakland—

cafes, tattoo parlors, and shops—indicating my interest in tattooing with a
connection to spirituality and religion. The people I interviewed articulated
rich theologies of tattooing, and while some made links to particular religious
traditions, most considered the practice to be outside the bounds of organized
religion. Indeed, scholars have drawn attention to new forms of spiritual-
ity in the contemporary era that are “free-floating and disconnected from
conventional anchors,” though “profoundly important” as religious sources
(Laderman 2009, xv–xvi; Clark and Clanton 2012; Forbes and Mahan 2005;
Lynch and Mitchell 2011; Mahan 2014; Mazur and McCarthy 2010). As one
person stated about his tattoos “These are very deep, [they have] very deep
meaning to me, and that’s why I never want them to go away. It’s part of me.
In that sense, I feel like it’s spiritual, in that it goes to my essence, as much as
anything else goes to my essence.” This statement captures the gist of many
other comments I received as well.4

MATERIALIZING THE ABSTRACT

My interest in spiritual tattooing arises within the context of contemporary
concern with materiality and embodiment in the study of religion. While
historically, the field of religious studies has focused on ideas, doctrines,
texts, and institutions, a significant shift has occurred in the last few decades
toward the body and practice and the ways that people actively constitute
religious meaning in their everyday lives. The traditional dualisms of mind/
body, spiritual/material, and religious/secular no longer hold sway; instead
scholars explore the myriad ways that people come to know the abstract
concepts, invisible beings, and imperceptible landscapes of religious worlds
through bodily experiences (Asad 1993; Griffith 2004; Houtman and Meyer

4
I am in the midst of continuing interviews (my goal is 50–70). As noted, I inter-
viewed 20 people for this particular project, and each interview lasted one hour. The
backgrounds of interviewees were diverse in some ways, and I plan to work towards
increased diversity in all areas in future interviews. The age of interviewees ranged from
the late 20s (one person) to the early 50s, and the average age was approximately 37 (I
did not solicit biographical information, though most offered it). About one-third of the
subjects were male (7) and the rest female. 13 interviewees were White, 3 were African
American, 2 were Hispanic, 1 self-identified as a “Person of Color,” and 1 was South
Indian. Religious affiliations/designations (past or present) were cited as: Pagan Bud-
dhist, Disciple of Jesus, Bahá’í Faith, Haitian Vodou, Scientologist, Catholic, Protestant,
Christian, Jewish, Evangelical Protestant, Pagan, Pagan Hermeticist, “Agnostic, Animist,
Environmentalist,” Magical Practitioner, “Artist of my Spiritual Practice,” “Non-Theistic,
Earth/Consciousness-Centered Spirituality,” Druid, and Buddhist. I have changed the
names of interviewees to preserve anonymity.

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192 JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND VIOLENCE

2012a; McDannell 1995; Morgan 2010a, 2012; Orsi 2005; Promey 2014). At
the same time, much interdisciplinary scholarship and work in fields such as
theology, cognitive science, and linguistics have cast a spotlight on the body
and emotions and the way they are linked to cognition, imagination, and
memory (Damasio 1999; Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 2003; Massumi 2002;
Meyer 2012; Smith 2013). Given the growing body of research that dem-
onstrates the inseparable links between thinking, feeling, and embodiment,
David Morgan urges scholars of religion to integrate discursive reasoning
with the body and think in terms of “aesthetic intelligence,” “sensuous cog-
nition,” and the “practices, things, and feelings that shape individuals and
communities over time” (2010b, xiv).
The body is a primary mediator of religious abstractions. Religion utilizes
a multiplicity of “incorporating practices” to clothe its conceptions with “an
aura of factuality” and to bring a new level of genuineness to these ideas
(Connerton 1989, 72ff; Geertz 1973, 90). Ritual, clothing, objects, images,
codes of comportment, and the inculcation of striking affective and sensory
states are essential to the “corporalization of the sacred” (Orsi 2005, 74).
The editors of Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality remark that
the material approach to religion seeks not to “unmask” the postulated enti-
ties of religion (God, gods, spirits), but to “grasp how practices of religious
mediation effect the presence of these entities in the world through bodily
sensations, texts, buildings, pictures, objects, and other material forms that
involve bodies and things” (Houtman and Meyer 2012b, 6).
Marking the body through tattooing is an intrinsically effective way to
materialize the sacred, as it lodges an image and its associated meanings
directly into the skin. One person explained that tattooing brings “bigger
spiritual experiences into the flesh, into form” and reminds her of “connections
of spirit that I have. Even though it might not be in the flesh all the time, a
tattoo is way that I can make it in the flesh.” Tattoos make nebulous, elusive
ideas accessible and believable by transforming them into physicality. Natalie
recounted that after a traumatizing event that led her to question God’s grace
and love, she tattooed these two words into her forearms to have a “tangible
reminder” of them: “Maybe if I have it on my arms it will be more real to me.”
Seeing the words every day helps her to accept God’s plan for her, however
difficult it may be to comprehend intellectually. As Durkheim wrote in 1912,
“in order to express our ideas to ourselves, we need to anchor them in mate-
rial things that symbolize them” (Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 173).
Tattooing is an ideal vehicle for this process.
Tattoos have the ability to engrave the concepts they represent into the
body/self, thereby becoming indistinguishable from it. Tattoos are embedded
permanently—“it’s something that absolutely cannot be taken away from me

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 SPIRITUAL TATTOOING: PAIN, MATERIALIZATION, AND TRANSFORMATION 193

until death”—and this engenders the perception that they are connected to
the person’s core. Many respondents articulated that tattoos had become a
“natural” part of their selves, without which they would feel incomplete. As
one person observed, “these are things that hold fundamental pieces of who I
am,” and another, when asked how she’d feel if her tattoo were instantaneously
erased, stated, “I’d feel empty. I’d feel like there was something definitely
missing . . . I would feel totally lost without it.”
Central to tattooing historically and cross-culturally has been its power to
signify personal and social identities (Blanchard 1991; Caplan 2000; DeMello
2000; Featherstone 2000; Gell 1993; Rubin 1988a), and numerous studies
analyze the relationship between tattooing and identity in the contemporary
world. Anthony Giddens and Chris Schilling argue that culture in late mo-
dernity has had a corrosive impact on traditional systems of meaning, social
order, and community, and in this context of ontological insecurity, individuals
engage in a heightened reflexivity towards the self and anchor identity ma-
terially through the practice of “body projects”—e.g., bodybuilding, plastic
surgery, branding, tattooing (Giddens 1991, 35ff; Shilling 1993). From a
different perspective, Mark C. Taylor contends that digital technologies and
social media have made reality ever more virtual; individuals experience a
“loss” of the body through such anonymous interaction and dematerialization,
and to compensate, they become ever more focused on it:
As the webs in which we are caught become ether nets, the realities with which
we deal become more and more ethereal. . . . When the body appears to be
endangered, it becomes an obsession. This is one of the primary reasons that
tattooing (as well as piercing and scarification) have become so widespread
during this particular historical and cultural period. Tattooing represents the
effort to mark the body at the very moment it is disappearing. (1998, 127–128)5
These theorists collectively interpret tattooing as a way to substantiate the
self and identity through inscribing meaning in the body, an idea that was
confirmed frequently in the interviews I conducted.

PAIN AND TRANSFORMATION

Tattooing and other forms of body modification are painful, which gives them
power to shape identity and spirituality. People who tattoo do not seek the
experience primarily for the pain, though if tattooing did not hurt, it would
not have the same effect (at least for most people I interviewed). “This tat-
too would not have meant the beauty had I not gone through the pain,” one
person commented, and Ethan—who tattooed to commemorate a friend who
committed suicide—recalled that the experience of pain in tattooing “gave it

5
All italics in quotes are in the original citation or interview.

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194 JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND VIOLENCE

more meaning, gave it gravity . . . you are passing through this very visceral
experience that affects you emotionally.”
Attention to embodiment and materiality has inspired interest in the role
of pain in the human experience, and particularly within religion (Alcorta and
Soisis 2013; Asad 1993; Benn 2007; Coakley and Shelemay 2007; Glucklich
2001; Juergensmeyer, Kitts, and Jerryson 2012). Chris Shilling and Phillip
Mellor draw attention to the modern western tendency to “instrumentalize”
and “medicalize” pain such that it is seen as almost purely “negative,” and
show that, historically and cross-culturally, pain has been “harnessed to
cultural frameworks that embrace it as positively productive of meanings,
identities, and societal relationships” (2010, 523 ff.).
Literature in various fields has elucidated the complex nature of physical
pain and its ability to trigger a host of neurophysiological effects that directly
influence thought, emotion, and memory, and conceptions of time, space,
and identity (Alcorta and Sosis 2013; Coakley and Shelemay 2007; Damasio
1999; Morinis 1985; Whitehouse 1996, 2004). Pain is “saturated with affect,”
and it therefore demands interpretation, though how it is construed inevitably
intertwines with culture and subjective states (Ahmed 2004, 194–195; Fields
2007; Kirmayer 2007; Kleinman 2007).6 In Sacred Pain, Ariel Glucklich
explores the diverse ways the interpretive potential of pain has been incor-
porated into religious contexts. Sensory pain, he shows, gives rise to physi-
ological, cognitive, and emotional responses that can be linked to concepts
and meanings that are purposively brought to it. “The same triggering event
can produce two diametrically opposed somatic reactions and emotions. A
razor cut across the thigh can produce fear or elation, a manipulated shoulder
(by a somatic psychotherapist, not an inquisitor) may flood awareness with
either joy or sadness. And yet the feelings are there, triggered by a pressed
muscle or irritated nerve before any mental image or conceptual attitude
intervenes” (2001, 137). People who pursue voluntary pain attach impres-
sions to the sensation in order to embody these ideas and provide a sense of
sustainability. As one person who tattooed put it simply, “when you connect
something with a physical stimuli like pain, it’s going to stick.”7
Tattooing generates a profound bodily enmeshment; through linking pain-
ful sensation to the conceptual meanings expressed in the tattoo, the whole

6
Sarah Coakley notes that “subjective experiences of pain are not simply random (or
philosophically misleading) addita to an objective physiological event . . . but a neces-
sary part of the pain event itself. Neurologically, in other words, we are wired to interpret
pain” (2007a, 5).
7
Paul Sweetman writes: “As corporeal artefacts, even the most playful and ironic of
contemporary tattoos retain an echo of the pain involved in their acquisition” (1999b, 65).

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 SPIRITUAL TATTOOING: PAIN, MATERIALIZATION, AND TRANSFORMATION 195

person is incorporated into the experience and enduring connections to what

the tattoo symbolizes are forged. Rafael—a “disciple of Jesus”—aspired to
embody the ideals of God’s kingdom in everyday life, but found the ideal
challenging to conceptualize and put into practice. After a period in which
he fell far short of his aspirations, Rafael tattooed the word “Basilea” (Greek
for “Kingdom”) into his forearm, and it created a rich sensory experience: “It
involved more of my senses. In my heart and in my soul and in my mind, I had
all of these things and concepts—at least the initial ideas of them—thought
through. This was something where the pain involved one other sense, which
was to feel.” Paul Sweetman notices that the painful and “invasive” nature of
tattooing and piercing can lead to “significant changes in the body modifier’s
understanding and experience of the (embodied) self,” and this was evidenced
in Rafael’s case. Through tattooing, the concept of God’s kingdom became
fused with his “corporeal subjectivity” (1999b, 174, 181): “I see the depth
of that word as each week or month goes by. I see more trueness to it. . . .
[It’s] as if I had a birth mark. It’s become an extension of me. It’s become a
part of who I am—my identity.”
Through physical experience, ideas and values gain an affective, sensorial
component that goes beyond simply reflecting or symbolizing them; rather,
practice brings things into being through the very doing (Asad 1993; Beduhn
2003; Butler 1993; Harrington 2010; Smith 2013; Stephenson 2005). Cath-
erine Bell writes that “kneeling does not merely communicate subordination
to the kneeler. For all intents and purposes, kneeling produces a subordinated
kneeler in and through the act itself” (1992, 100). In a similar vein, Saba
Mahmood shows that Egyptian Muslim women engage in actions (such as
wearing the hijab) to create piety rather than merely to express it: “The pious
subject does not precede the performance of normative virtues but is enacted
through the performance” (2005, 163).
Physical pain is widely cultivated in religion, given its facility to “trans-
late” abstractions into material form (Durkheim 1912, 163). In Sanctity and
Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500–1700, Jimmy Yu analyzes
practices of blood writing, flesh slicing, chastity mutilations, and self-
immolation as “instrumental” acts that constructed subjectivity and materially
constituted religious and cultural values. In particular, the performance of
blood writing—the use of one’s own blood to compose or copy sacred texts—
was “practical, technically effective behavior” that literally enacted the virtue
of self-detachment. In so doing, the bodies of blood writers “instantiated and
thus conferred facticity on abstract ideals and values that were otherwise dif-
ficult to demonstrate” (2012, 61, 47). The intense pain, the scars left in the
body, and the symbolic resonance of blood gave this exercise the power to
reinforce the sanctity of religious truths. “Blood from the body authenticated,

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196 JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND VIOLENCE

animated, and sacralized the words of the scriptures outside the body . . .
it asserted a message stronger than any that could have been created in any
other medium” (61). The body is a powerful conveyor of materiality and
therefore a fundamental element in religion, which specializes in conceptual
abstractions, invisible realities, and truths that are considered to be absolute.
Yu notes that when ideas and beliefs “cease to elicit conviction either because
they have been challenged or divested of meaning, the sheer materiality or
physicality of the human body might lend that cultural construct an aura of
‘authenticity’ and ‘certainty’” (15).

TRAUMA AND PAIN

The pain of tattooing can concretize inchoate emotions and memories and
make them accessible for healing work. Ethan explained that after his friend’s
suicide, “I was just so sad,” and tattooing provided a “way of dealing with
sadness through pain. It allowed me to embody it and release it emotionally,
in a way.” People with deep trauma find critical expression in the material-
izing function of the body. Julia was in her twenties when she uncovered a
whole cache of what had been repressed memories of early sexual abuse. She
related that, since childhood, “I had emotionally left my body—I had tried
to reconnect over and over but I couldn’t.” After realizing the circumstances
of her memories, she tattooed an image of a tree that covered the whole of
her back, with roots reaching down into her hips: “I wanted to etch it into my
body because I’d been ignoring all the signs my body had been giving me my
whole life that it had trauma attached to it.” Writing on the body itself (the
reverse of blood writing) “instantiated and thus conferred facticity” on her
experiences, and the physical pain actualized her suffering: “I wanted to feel
hurt, I wanted to feel sore, I wanted to be able to hear my body say ‘wow this
hurts me,’ and be able to answer it and say, ‘yes, that’s legitimate, that’s true,
that’s real.’ Because that didn’t happen the first time my body hurt—no one
held my hand and said ‘yes, this is real, you are hurt,’ so I got to do that for
myself.” After getting the tattoo, she noted, “I felt exhausted—I felt legiti-
mately exhausted. The pain that I had been feeling for so long was emotional
and wasn’t actually physical, but it finally felt real, now that I actually hurt.”
As Julia’s case illustrates, physical and emotional pain can mesh experien-
tially such that one can be used to realize the other. Though the mechanistic
links between the two are debated and some consider the link to be wholly
“metaphorical” (Woolf 2007, 27 ff.), Laurence J. Kirmayer observes that
some forms of emotional pain share “common substrates” with pain control
systems and that physical pain has an affective dimension that is distinct from
pathways that convey the sensory qualities of pain. He writes, “The crucial

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 SPIRITUAL TATTOOING: PAIN, MATERIALIZATION, AND TRANSFORMATION 197

observation from cognitive neuroscience is that higher-order processes reach

down to modulate incoming sensory information so that larger meanings
shape our sensory/perceptual apprehension of the world” (2007, 374; Asad
2000; Coakley 2007a; Fields 2007).
For many with traumatic memories, directly accessing intense emotions
can be exceedingly difficult, and sensory pain can serve as a connecting point
given its relationship to affective states. For Hannah, tattooing provided a
means for feeling and facing raw physical pain, and her ability simply to be
present through the process enabled her to awaken feelings of being alive
after having felt dead. Hannah recounted that she suffered terrifying sexual
abuse for years as a child that was never recognized by her family, and as a
result she experienced a “deadening of spirit.” She explained, “when there
is abuse, and there are people around you that just don’t want to acknowl-
edge abuse because they can’t deal with it themselves, you’re insignificant,
you’re dead, it doesn’t matter.” Although Hannah was aware she had a need
to address, she told herself, “we can’t deal with this right now because we
have bills to pay.” Then, after a series of sexual assaults in the marines, past
memories began to surface, and she spiraled downward into a dangerous
depression. Fortunately, she met another sexual abuse survivor who urged
her to take those events and feelings seriously, and she resolved to confront
her memories to begin the process of healing.
Within this context, Hannah tattooed an image of a mermaid on her arm.
“I have this ability to just go out of my body and space out; I learned that as
a child,” but “the whole process of a tattoo is really like having somebody
drag broken glass on your flesh—it freaking hurts.” The capacity to “sit still
amidst the pain and not move” presented a turning point for Hannah: “It re-
ally is counterintuitive. It’s like a good thing—it made me feel alive . . . there
was such a truth in the pain.” Pain has an “incontestable reality” that makes
it fundamental in the “objectification of truth” (Scarry 1987, 27; Asad 1993,
123). Hannah did not succumb to the pain (by moving during the process)
or attempt to overcome it (by “going out” of her body). Instead, she stayed
present and felt the full weight of pain, thinking to herself, “I can endure this
pain—I am strong.” Confronting the truth of physical/emotional pain assigned
substance to her long-suppressed and minimized memories and allowed Han-
nah to release “the dread of annihilation” that accompanies unacknowledged
abuse, delivering her into a new reality through the experience (Kirmayer
1996, 190; Antze and Lambek 1996; Van der Kolk 2014).
The body tends to be enlisted when significant abstractions are involved. In
such contexts, self-violence and voluntary pain can be productive rather than
destructive or “pathological.” Yu emphasizes that the practices of self-injury
he chronicles “were not negations of the body. Instead, these technologies of

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198 JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND VIOLENCE

the body were instrumental and in themselves epistemologically productive;

they fashioned the body ‘with a much higher aim’ in order to produce a par-
ticular kind of social subject and participant . . . one sanctified and revered”
(2012, 16).8 In contexts of abuse and repression (personal, religious, politi-
cal), self-violence can externalize invisible suffering and provide material
expression to a person or community. In her analysis of the phenomenon of
self-mutilation (through cutting) among trauma survivors, Janice McLane
delineates the constructive signifying function of injury to the body.
Self-mutilation is generally seen only as a negative response to trauma. But
when trauma cannot be expressed, other forms of communication become
necessary. As gestural communication, self-mutilation can reorganize and
stabilize the trauma victim’s world, providing a ‘voice on the skin’ when the
actual voice is forbidden. (1996, 107; Kilby 2001)9
In a similar fashion, Karin M. Fierke argues that “an act of political self-
sacrifice speaks without words, yet is louder than words, against a background
in which silence has been imposed on a population” (2013, 53). Self-sacrifice
communicates more effectively than words because it evokes “primal”
emotions that go beyond discursive thought. “It is not only that the image
captures the attention; it also causes a disruption or a rupture, insofar as it
is so perplexing, so contrary to ideas of self-preservation, that the audience
has to stop and ask questions about what is happening and why” (11–12).
Fierke emphasizes that the self-violence of a political “martyr” can be a
crucial means for communities to access emotions associated with autonomy
and independence: “The injured or dead body communicates the possibility
of new life. In speaking, it breaks through the silence and performs a rebirth
of dignity” (95). Self-injury can therefore reverse the process that Elaine
Scarry outlines, whereby state violence and torture are instruments to “un-
make” the worlds of people and thereby—through the process of “analogical
verification”—confer materiality on the state (1987, 14). As paraphrased by
Juergensmeyer and Kitts, “Now it seems the regime (not the pain) that has

8
In Burning for the Buddha: Self Immolation in Chinese Buddhism, James A. Benn
writes: “Self-immolation was not a marginal or deviant practice indulged in by a handful of
suicidal losers. . . . Most premodern Chinese Buddhists lived in a world in which the body
and its actions were intensely meaningful. If we cannot learn to appreciate how and why
that was so, what can we hope to say about Chinese Buddhism as a whole?” (2007, 195).
9
McLane emphasizes that though self-mutilation can be a mode of (necessary) self-
expression, alone it cannot communicate what it must; words need to be used. “Self-
mutilation provides the possibility of a new openness. . . . This new possibility would
not be the hand holding a razor blade which cuts across the skin, but breath being pushed
across the larynx, shaped by mouth and tongue, into a spoken word” (1996, 117).

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 SPIRITUAL TATTOOING: PAIN, MATERIALIZATION, AND TRANSFORMATION 199

power, the regime (not the pain) that seems real” (2011, 190). In situations of
political abuse, acts of self-violence “allow otherwise disembodied beliefs,
in this case about justice, to be reconnected with the force and power of the
material world” (Fierke 2013, 90).

MECHANICS OF PAIN
Understanding the operations of (voluntary) pain on an individual level re-
quires analyzing some of its mechanics. Fundamentally, pain is a sensation
that compels one to be brought squarely into the temporal present. As one
person explained, the pain of tattooing put him in a “completely different
frame of mind”—“it sucks you in and draws you into the moment. I had to
be there in that moment.” Interview subjects related the intensity of tattooing
jolting them into awareness and taking them out of a “numb” state (physi-
cally, mentally, spiritually), and this had instrumental value for those who
“zone out” or dissociate due to trauma. “The pain made me stay in my body,
it was a way to wake up my body and bring me back to it.” In addition, pain
heightens sensory awareness and facilitates focused attention:
You feel the shock of the needle and your body becomes sweaty and cold, and
then after a while you sink into it. It’s like a meditative state. You feel every
inch of your body as they are tattooing you . . . you feel every moment of it,
and by the time it’s done, it’s raw, it’s hot . . . it’s such a journey and process
in itself to [put] this into my body.
The very experience of voluntary pain creates a context rich with poten-
tial for transformation. From a strictly biological perspective, humans (and
other animals) have a “deep-seated natural drive” to avoid and alleviate pain
(Morinis 1985, 166). Clifford J. Woolf points out that “what makes pain
different from all other sensory experiences” is that the sensation is “linked
inescapably and integrally with a conscious awareness of its unpleasantness.
Pain is always painful!” (2007, 28). Pain is the opposite of an ideal state, and
the natural interpretive response to it is Why am I in pain and how can I end it
as quickly as possible? With voluntary or self-inflicted pain, however, the full
weight of pain is felt without an attempt to escape it, and this signals that the
act is/must be invested with significance. One respondent rhetorically asked,
“[Who] is going to inflict pain on themselves if it’s not a spiritual thing?”
Another expressed that tattooing “forced me to say, ‘Is this worth it? Is this a
whimsical thing that you are going to painfully put on yourself, or is it going to
be something worth value to me? Does the value of this outweigh the pain?’”
The suffering involved in tattooing helps explain (in part) why many use
terms such as “ritual,” “rite of initiation,” “sacrifice,” and “spiritual/sacred”
to describe it and why religious language is frequently seen in the names

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200 JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND VIOLENCE

of tattoo shops (e.g., Sacred Ink, Temple Tattoo). Moreover, since tattoo-
ing involves blood—“tattoos are essentially drawn in blood; it’s blood and
ink”—it can evoke rich symbolic meanings and provide a channel to engage
the self on a higher/spiritual level. For example, Stephanie related her desire
to communicate with relatives who died in great suffering, to “acknowledge
the fact that they made my life better while they were here” and “to some-
how make up for the things I didn’t do.” The ordeal of pain and bloodletting
in tattooing created a connection for an exchange that “evens the scale, in a
way. . . . They aren’t here for me to have a conversation with them. There is
no more back and forth with them, so that was like my last back and forth:
You suffered, I suffer; I am your blood, you are my blood.”
Intense sensory pain gives rise to altered states of awareness that can be
utilized for programs of self-transformation, which helps to account for the
prevalence of painful rites in religious practice. Alan Morinis suggests that
acute pain in a ritual context can lead to a “peak experience” that fundamen-
tally marks consciousness: “The boundaries of ordinary experience are pierced
by this new sensation, and the result is a change in which one ‘perceives
anew’” (1985, 166). A recent study analyzing the evolutionary significance
of ritualized violence explains that painful and “highly charged” experiences
alter initiates “physically, psychologically, and socially; they also sculpt
indelible neurophysiological changes” (Alcorta and Sosis 2013, 581). The
authors note that such rites “evoke intense emotions that may subsequently
be suppressed but are nearly impossible to erase” (581). Many interview
participants attested to the transformative power of pain. As one observed,
“the core of spirituality is feeling a connection, and pain opens you up—pain
allows you to be connected even more.”
In Sacred Pain, Glucklich elucidates the way that pain inculcated in a
religious context can be utilized by participants seeking to “open” or “con-
nect” the self on a spiritual level. He summarizes that, metaphorically, “pain
creates an embodied ‘absence’ that makes way for a new and greater ‘pres-
ence.’” The more pain that is applied to the body, “the less output the central
nervous system generates from the areas that regulate the signals on which
a sense of self relies. Modulated pain weakens the individual’s feeling of
being a discrete agent; it makes the ‘body-self’ transparent and facilitates
the emergence of a new identity” (2001, 207). The transparent state induced
by pain can be employed in diverse ways and for different ends, according
to the significant roles of culture and personal intention. Glucklich cites the
example of mystics who inflict pain on themselves to refashion the self and
merge with what they consider to be sacred, noting “the new identity is almost
always what they expected or set out to achieve” (207).

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 SPIRITUAL TATTOOING: PAIN, MATERIALIZATION, AND TRANSFORMATION 201

Physical pain has the capacity to foster new and powerful memories. In
his study of the neurobiological and sensory effects of pain, Woolf observes,
“the molecular mechanisms that underlie many of the processes responsible
for pain are almost identical to those responsible for memory” (Coakley,
Cole, and Woolf 2007, 272). Confirming this assertion, Jennifer Cole notes,
“those drugs that alleviate pain also erase memory” (2007, 260). In his work
on the “imagistic mode of religiosity,” Harvey Whitehouse draws attention
to what is termed “flashbulb memory,” a form of memory in which “extreme
emotions and cognitive shocks become intertwined.” Whitehouse explains
that cognitive shocks, such as physical pain, generate intense emotions and
trigger a “now print” mechanism that etches memories into consciousness
(1996, 710 ff.; 2004, 105 ff.).
Without exception, each person I interviewed linked tattooing to memory
(in many ways). In Leah’s case, for example, the pain of tattooing created
a pathway for remembering her experience and recovery from addiction, as
she prepared to leave the safety net of family: “I wanted something to carry
with me—a time where I would remember that moment—and I can still very
much remember getting the tattoo, and feeling the pain, and I was leaving
. . . feeling the pain was a remembrance of what I had there, of the support,
my mom, my parents and family.” Pain registers physically and emotion-
ally, and consequently, concepts attached to the experience are secured in
memory. In her analysis of political self-sacrifice, Fierke demonstrates that
pain experienced by another person can operate in a related way. The self-
injury of a political martyr, she shows, can evoke powerful emotions in those
who witness or hear about it, and trigger “memories of resistance” that act
as a counter to “official memories of the state, which excludes the memories
of the abject Others it constructs” (2013, 98).
Voluntary pain can be harnessed not only to make new memories adhere
or “print,” but to rewrite traumatic memories. David, for instance, actively
sought out tattooing to create different associations with the sensation of bodily
pain, having been abused physically as a child. He explained that he wanted to
benefit from the “recency effect”—the idea that the first and last experiences in
a series are most remembered, rather than the intervening ones—to refashion
his memory of the infliction of pain. By establishing a link between pain and
something spiritual (his tattoo), he transformed memories of abuse. As he
related, “when you make something sacred, that heals.” For many, traumatic
experiences lead to the formation of intrusive, “flashbulb” memories associ-
ated with post-traumatic stress disorder. Given that such memories are seared
into consciousness through extreme emotion entangled with the pain of abuse,
it is no wonder that the practice of spiritual tattooing—which also involves

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202 JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND VIOLENCE

intensified emotions and physical pain, though in a ritualized context—might

aid in reworking memories.
Jennifer Cole, in her study of the Malagasy community (in east Mada-
gascar), illustrated the way these individuals used traditional cattle sacrifice
rituals to heal from traumatizing memories of a rebellion that took place in
1947–1948 against the French colonial regime. The community ritual incul-
cated “visceral, bodily intensity, and excitation,” and linked this production
of affect to a strategically produced narrative to rework the residents’ origi-
nal traumatic memories (2007, 262). As Cole writes, “particularly in cases
of social violence and healing, the ability of ritual to assuage pain lies in its
ability to draw pain into the process of producing—which is always, also, as
many scholars have argued, a process of reconstructing—people’s memories”
(247). She suggests, “it seems that sometimes you have to remember in order
to forget; it’s not that you’re creating a disjunction between them” (Coakley,
Cole, and Woolf 2007, 272).

BODY MARKS
With tattooing and other forms of body modification, the experience of pain
materializes emotions and memories, and so too does the mark that is left in
the skin. Hannah explained that she had been “so strong for so long with all
of these dark secrets” that she needed a “visual representation of the pain.
It’s going to come out and be manifested in an image, whereas the other
pain—when you have childhood sexual abuse and you’re not allowed to talk
about it—it just goes internal.” Critical to the project of healing from trauma
is the act of concretizing memory and experience. In her moving account of
the struggle to heal from rape, Susan J. Brison emphasizes the necessity of
“bearing witness” to traumatic memories in order to remake the self; “since
the earlier self died, the surviving self needs to be known and acknowledged
in order to exist” (2002, 62). Brison attests that traumatic memories “are
more tied to the body than memories are typically considered to be. .  .  .
[They] remain in the body, in each of the senses, in the heart that races and
skin that crawls whenever something resurrects the only slightly buried
terror” (44–45). Defusing recollections of trauma requires “externalizing”
memories and making one’s story visible to others, and this can take place
through verbalization, the written word, or listening to the trauma narratives
of others (Brison 2002, 73, 48 ff; Antze and Lambek 1996; Kirmayer 1996;
Van der Kolk 2014).10

10
Brison explains that listening to the stories of others is a way of hearing one’s own,
in a sense.

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 SPIRITUAL TATTOOING: PAIN, MATERIALIZATION, AND TRANSFORMATION 203

Brison points out that some trauma survivors need expression that ex-
tends beyond “purely linguistic narratives” and pursues action to create an
“embodied narrative.” Such modes of expression (she cites the example of
taking self-defense classes) bring the body directly into the healing process
and enable a visceral sense of mastery (2002, 68–73; Van der Kolk 2014).
Tattooing and other forms of body modification are powerful ways to accom-
plish this type of externalization, given that they inscribe in the body itself a
visual representation of a person’s interpretation of experience and identity.
As David related, “I can’t change what happened to me as a child. But I can
change how I see it and what the visible marks are now.”
Marking the body is a compelling way to assert the self and identity because
it is a visible statement that one is in control of the body/self (Benson 2000;
DeMello 2000; Gell 1993; Kapchan 1993; MacCormack 2006; Patterson and
Schroeder 2010; Pike 2001; Pitts 2003; Sweetman 1999a, 1999b; Young 1993).
Body modifiers frequently invoke the idea that altering the appearance of the
body is a way to “reclaim” it and to defy conventions of self-presentation. In
reference to one subculture of body modifiers, Michael Atkinson and Kevin
Young write that, “often shunned as repugnant self-mutilation, painful forms
of radical body modification are not viewed by [Neo Primitives] as acts that
symbolically destroy the self, but rather a means of constructing physically
stronger bodies and emotionally empowered social selves” (2001, 135). Along
the same lines, Patricia MacCormack interprets marking the body as a way to
thwart others’ attempts to control or “organize” it: “To organize a body is to
exert a power through it, enclosing it in limited meaning. . . . A tattooed body
resists organization by presenting another layer which must be organized, the
signification of which is volitional but neither clear nor stable” (2006, 64).
For Ella, who had a disorienting and traumatizing childhood—having been
born in Haiti and then adopted into an abusive family in the U.S.—tattooing
facilitated the development of her own identity and independence: “I wanted
something to do with my body that I had control over, that was connected to
what I want to be or who I am, how I see myself or how I’d like to see my-
self. . . . [Getting a tattoo] helped me develop my own identity, instead of the
identity of a survivor or [the] identity of a victim . . . I am my own creation.”
The rich corporeality of body modification makes it an ideal vehicle for
a physical feeling of self-control. For many, the ability to withstand the pain
of tattooing and other “rituals of the flesh,” such as piercing, branding, and
scarification, lends itself to experiences of self-mastery (Atkinson and Young
2001, 125). Ella remarked that getting a tattoo was “very cathartic, because it
was a pain I could withstand and a pain I could control.” Julia concurred that
central to the tattoo experience is “the strength thing, being able to endure

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204 JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND VIOLENCE

the pain of causing this to myself and still surviving it . . . reminding myself
of how strong I am even [with] all these scars and this damage.”
Alfred Gell notes that what he calls the “basic technical schema” of tat-
tooing (puncturing the skin, inserting something into the body, bloodletting,
and the formation of a permanent mark) involves dynamics that elicit feelings
of being contained, protected, sealed off, and fitted with “character armour”
(1993, 9, 31 ff). The fact that tattoos are actually in the flesh allows them to be
experienced as “the creation of a substitute envelope enfolding an otherwise
exposed social persona in a protective, implicitly maternal, embrace” (32).11
Sweetman likewise highlights the “sealing” function of body modification.
In contemporary culture, where diverse forces (corporate, political, medical)
vie for “penetration” of the individual, “opening one’s body up to the tattoo or
piercing needle might be seen as a way of regaining control of the boundaries
of the self, reclaiming one’s body from the experts in an act of deliberative,
creative, and non-utilitarian (self-) penetration” (1999a, 178). Modifying
the body has significant impacts on subjectivity that can persist indefinitely.
The author of Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X,
relates that though more than a decade had passed since his piercing, “the
mark of indelible experience is ever with me, as proof that something marked
me, something happened” (Beaudoin 2000, 77).
Tattoos become powerful anchors for ideas and identity because they are
visual images incorporated into the flesh. In contrast to cognitive wishes (I am
a strong person) or verbalized affirmations (“I am strong!”) images give rise
to affective states simply by being seen; inscribed into the body, they enable
a person to inhabit a new conception of the self. Hannah emphasized that the
mermaid tattoo on her arm conveyed “the reality—of this is me,” and pointed
out that although the mermaid has a fishing hook in her and is bleeding, “she’s
still able to float in the ocean, upward, with this beautiful grace . . . her chest
is up, her arms are back, her head is up, and she’s transcending upward with
grace and dignity and beauty. And that’s what this is—it’s survival despite the
wound.” As Hannah explained the tattoo imagery, she mirrored the posture
and demeanor of the mermaid, and in so doing physically manifested the
serenity depicted. Hannah’s interaction with the mermaid image exemplifies
the “visceral” nature of seeing that Morgan articulates in The Embodied Eye,
and it can be understood as a form of “corpothetics”—“embodied, corporeal
aesthetics” concerned with bodily engagement (and even unity) with devo-
tional images (Pinney 2004, 8).

11
Susan Benson writes that tattoos can provide an “additional protective carapace
to those most buffeted by the operations of power and by marginalization” (2000, 239).

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 SPIRITUAL TATTOOING: PAIN, MATERIALIZATION, AND TRANSFORMATION 205

Seeing is believing, and belief is as much sensory and affective as it is

cognitive and discursive (Morgan, 2010a, 2012; Pattison 2007; Roberts 2010;
Smith 2013). Julia emphasized the significance of the visual transformation
that tattooing accomplished and the power it gave her to create meaning
from painful memories. Relating her pursuit of the experience of tattooing an
image of a tree on her back, she explained, “I wanted to go back to someplace
that had pain and trauma in it, but that I was walking in on purpose. I took
all this extra rage and emotion and was able to put it on me in a way that I
was comfortable with, that added beauty. I took these ugly scars and made
them pretty.”
Tattoos and other body marks acquired in pain can implant an image/idea
so deeply that they create “body memories.”12 Emily explained that after a
series of painful relationships in which she surrendered her individuality and
control, she tattooed into her left side the words “I will never lose myself
again” in Spanish in large and “angry” letters. “As he was literally carving
this thing in my body, I was like, ‘I will never lose myself again.’ And I
have not lost myself, ever since.” When situations arise in which she could
potentially revert to old habits, “I refer to it. My brain goes left. And it’s just
like, where it is. My thoughts, my attention to my body goes to it, but I don’t
have to even say the words.”
In Emily’s case (and many others), the meaning embodied in the tattoo
operates at a level deeper than discursive thought. Morgan’s phrase, “sensu-
ous cognition,” is apt here. Moreover, because tattoos are inscribed into the
body through intense sensation and occupy a localized and visible place in
the skin, they can be experienced in a way that is not possible with images or
objects outside the self. Julia “feels” her whole tree tattoo, and the roots are
the most palpable: “It was really important to me that the tree had roots that
were visible . . . because I needed the grounding and I needed the rootedness,
and the roots hurt the most when I got the tattoo . . . I needed to remember
that they are there.”
Julia’s tattoo functions in a way analogous to the yoga Tree Pose medi-
tation—a grounding technique that involves cultivating the feeling that one
is a tree, with roots deep in the ground. However, because the “tree” is liter-
ally in the flesh and was made part of her through acute sensation, it is the
site for a visual/visceral memory that affects her spirituality and everyday
consciousness; “I can key into it to ground myself and be present, and know
what is happening around me.”

12
For an interesting discussion of “body memory,” see Fuchs et al. 2012.

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206 JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND VIOLENCE

CONCLUSION
Though space did not permit a discussion of the issue, it must be recognized
that the significance of tattoos is crucially connected to their social and com-
municative functions. Gell notes that a Robinson Crusoe figure would never be
tempted to tattoo; alone on an island, tattooing would not make sense, because
it is an inherently social practice. The act of tattooing, Gell writes, produces
a “paradoxical double skin” that achieves “the exteriorization of the interior
which is simultaneously the interiorization of the exterior” (1993, 38–39).
Any tattoo, then, “indeed a mark of any kind on the skin,” is a “registration
of an external social milieu,” because it is only in relation to that milieu that
the tattoo has meaning. “The apparently self-willed tattoo always turns out
to have been elicited by others and to be a means of eliciting responses from
others, the tattoo being the permanent record or trace of this process of social
exchange as well as one means of conducting it” (36–37).
Marking the body is a compelling mode of communication because it
invites attention and relates an experiential account of the self to others. The
interaction the tattoo elicits then brings an additional element of healing
to those who bear these marks. Stephanie, whose tattoos represent family
members who have passed away, noted that every time someone remarks
on her tattoos, she is able to tell the story of her relatives. “It makes it easier
and easier and easier every time somebody asks me, it makes it easier to let
it go and just have it be something pretty . . . it’s a way for me to work it
out.” In addition, tattoos can help people find meaning in their stories and
enable them to extend the benefit of their tattoo experience to others. Hannah
recounted that her mermaid tattoo has been a source of inspiration to and
strength for people around her, and this has given her a new perspective on
her painful childhood experiences: “With this tattoo, I have people coming
up to me, and they just gasp and start touching it without asking me [which
she doesn’t mind]. . . . So many people connect to this tattoo. It makes me
feel like, wow, you know, I’m not alone. I can help heal other people. My
suffering was not in vain.”
The body is key to materializing abstractions, and this essay has focused on
one particular mode of materializing the sacred. As we have seen, tattoos work
through an inside-out/outside-in mechanism. The process of tattooing draws
amorphous or overwhelming interior elements (thoughts, emotions, memories)
out and materializes them through the infliction of pain. At the same time, things
of desire outside the self (spiritual ideals, healing symbols, conceptions of a
new self) are conveyed into the body through the process of painful inscription.
The tattoo needle is a powerful device; as it pierces the skin it brings to the
surface “ugly scars” and “dark secrets,” while simultaneously etching into the

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 SPIRITUAL TATTOOING: PAIN, MATERIALIZATION, AND TRANSFORMATION 207

flesh images of “beauty” and “survival.” Rachel spoke eloquently of spiritual

tattooing as a form of “alchemy,” as a way of transforming and transmuting
various dimensions of a person. Tattooing, she explained, is a way to “marry
the body with the mind and with the spirit,” and thus, “anything that you do
on one level filters through all the other levels.” For her, the crucial insight
of the alchemists of history was their recognition that the material world and
material things “all had other dimensions that it filters through, so when you’re
turning lead into gold, that is an allegory for emotional, mental, and spiritual
transformation. But it’s also not disposable; it’s not like you don’t need the
material part—it’s just as much a part of us.” Thus, materiality is key to all
aspects of being human; mind, body, and spirit are inseparably linked, and
the body is the linchpin, the thing that makes it all concrete and real, bringing
ultimate value and significance to abstraction.

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