~The Culture of Ink~: Exhibit at Wake Forest explores tattooing through the ages

The Maori, the native people of New Zealand, used tattoos to pass on history to the next generation, inking their faces with elaborate swirling patterns.

It wasn't until European settlers came along that a written form of the Maori language was developed. The tattoos were their written heritage, showing ancestry and rank -- so much so that families preserved and kept the heads of dead chiefs.

Pricked on by generations of ethnic groups, buzzed on by hardened criminals and inked on by people searching for self-expression, tattoos have had a place in history for almost as long as there have been people.

A new exhibit at Wake Forest University's Museum of Anthropology explores tattoos through the ages, from the ancient "painted" Picts of Scotland to a handful of Wake Forest alumni and students who show off their tattoos in modern photographs.

"Only Skin Deep? Tattooing in World Cultures" will run through Aug. 28.

The project is the effort of eight anthropology students who studied tattoos and tattoo cultures during the fall and spring of 2009.

Students picked a culture and created a museum display out of their research.

The class also conducted a campus survey about tattoos and took field trips to such tattoo studios as the Tattoo Archive on Fourth Street, a combination bookshop, tattoo shop and museum, and Earth's Edge on Silas Creek Parkway.

Julia Rogers, a WFU alumna from Durham who graduated last spring, particularly remembers chatting with a guy at Earth's Edge who was getting a tattoo on one of his biceps -- a crown looped around bags of money and coins.

Rogers asked what it meant. "Money is king," he told her. "What you really hope for, sometimes there's a good story

behind it," she said. And sometimes -- not.

But tattoos have been telling our stories for thousands of years.

The Maoris are well-known for theirs. The Picts -- whose name means "painted" or "tattooed" -- tattooed themselves with a blue dye made from the woad plant. Fierce blue-tattooed men made an impression on the invading Romans, who frowned on tattoos.

Crystal Williams, a senior from High Point, researched the Copts, a Middle Eastern Christian group that still exists today. They added dates to their tattoos every time they went on a religious pilgrimage. "I was interested that they were a Christian group that embraced tattoos," she said, "because your body is supposed to be made as God's image."

The contradiction facinates Williams because Christians have traditionally considered tattoos to be taboo.

When she has saved up enough money, she wants to get her own tattoo, perhaps an ankle bracelet to which she can add small additional tattoos every time she travels to a new place -- sort of like the Copts.

The WFU exhibit includes a grim-looking 1960s tattoo machine, jerry-rigged from odds and ends -- the socket for an electrical light, cardboard, tape -- by California prison convicts. There is also a photo of elaborately-inked legs and buttocks of Samoan men, who viewed tattooing as a rite of passage and so much a test of their manhood that men without tattoos were considered cowards.

"Tattoos can be very individual, but at the same time they mark you as a member of a group," Rogers said. "I think a lot of people in the United States still see it as a marginalized or counter culture, but it obviously takes artistic talent to do it."

Stephen Whittington, the museum's director and an adjunct professor of anthropology, said he has wanted to do a tattoo exhibit for some time. His wife, Christine, co-wrote a young adult's book about tattooing (Body Marks: Tattooing, Piercing and Scarification) and has seven tattoos, from the M-shaped loops of the astrological symbol representing Virgo to a symbol taken from a Swedish "standing stone."

"It's just such a widespread trend all over the world," Stephen Whittington said. "It's obviously something people feel is important to identity."

Tattoos often wobble back and forth between being socially unacceptable, and embraced and even expected, depending on where you are, and what era you are looking at, Whittington said. "It sort of cycles back and forth."

Rogers -- who said she'll probably never get a tattoo because she would want to change it from time to time -- was especially intrigued by the idea of a tattoo's permanence.

We tend to think of tattoos as durable drawings that become as much a part of us as moles or scars -- whether they are the result of careful planning or a spontaneous souvenir from a wild trip to Las Vegas.

But researchers can have trouble studying tattoos because skin is rarely preserved. They can see images on artwork and read about tattoos in writings, but it's harder to find physical evidence. Though it does crop up, such as the tattoos on Oetzi the Iceman, the 5,300-year-old body of a man found by hikers in the Austrian Alps.

"He was so perfectly preserved that you could actually see the tattoos on his body without a microscope," said Chuck Eldridge, who owns the Tattoo Archive and will speak at WFU on Jan. 28. "They were just lines and dots … people theorized that they were therapeutic. He probably had arthritis and rheumatism."

Eldridge spends a lot of time reading and writing about tattoo history. Tattoos are hard to separate from pop culture, he said.

"It's part of who we are. And culturally, each group kind of has its own reasons for it. It's not much different from shoes, cars, clothes. That's part of who we are. We want to be different yet be accepted.

"Really, I think a tattoo shop simply mirrors what's going on outside the door. They bring in logos from bands, they bring in images from movies … just think of all the people who have Mickey Mouse on them."

lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com

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If you go

Chuck Eldridge, a tattoo artist, historian and the owner of the Tattoo Archive on Fourth Street, will speak Jan. 28 at 7 p.m. at WFU's Museum of Anthropology on "Tattooing 101." Admission is free to the lecture and the museum. For more information, go to www.wfu.edu/moa.