Second Skin, Pain and Identity

   Body modification has long been a significant part of human culture. For at least 5000 years, tattoos have been done for a variety of purposes, such as initiation rituals, showing status or rank, or as a badge of honor. Rather than mere ornaments, tattoos were sacred ceremonies involving many rituals. The tattoo artist was regarded as a sacred person with supernatural powers. Some of the techniques were extremely painful, and it was very important to endure this pain and complete the ceremony successfully. If not, the person would be marked with an unfinished tattoo for the rest of their life and be looked down on.

   Today, tattooing is still a symbolic and spiritual act for many people in modern society. What is our motivation behind this voluntary pain, which is contrary to our basic instinct to avoid it? Tattooing is the corporalization and materialization of the sacred, a painful process of transforming abstract ideas into tangible images on the skin. Working inside-out/outside-in by drawing thoughts, emotions, and memories out and materializing them, while bringing desired ideas (a new self, healing, power, etc.) into the body from the outside. Alfred Gell says, tattooing produces a paradoxical double skin that achieves the exteriorization of the interior, which is simultaneously the interiorization of the exterior.

   Pain is a sensation that brings one into the temporal present where the sense of self becomes more transparent. Self-violence and voluntary pain, according to Ariel Glucklich (Sacred Pain), can be productive rather than pathological. Memory can be triggered by physical pain. Clifford Woolf explains that identical molecular mechanisms underlie pain and memory. Through voluntary pain, trauma can be processed by bringing it to consciousness.

   The ability to withstand pain as a way to self-mastery and body modification is a strong way to claim one's own identity. Tattoos serve as a defensive second skin as a component of the social person, a 'character armor,' according to Gell, Robinson Cruise would never be tempted to tattoo, as it is being inherently social practise.