Until the 1970s, the wearing of tattoos was a predominantly masculine practice, especially prevalent amongst the military, prisoner, and biker communities. There were significant differences between the tattoos acquired by each of these groups. In particular, military tattoos were often patriotic in nature, whereas biker tattoos tended to express more antisocial themes. In each case, however, their adoption of tattoos was predicated on an affirmation of a patriarchal conception of masculinity as an antidote to the disempowerment they experienced in many aspects of their lives. As a number of commentators have argued, tattoos have frequently been acquired by individuals in situations where they no longer feel in control of their own destinies. These could be situations where they are subject to intense regimes of discipline and surveillance, such as the military and amongst prisoners, or situations of economic and social insecurity, as experienced by disaffected working class youth. In these circumstances, self-chosen tattoos have been seen as a defiant assertion of control over at least one aspect of one's life-namely, one's body Tattooing, however, as it has occurred within the military, prisoner, and biker communities, has not just been an act of self-assertion, but more specifically, an affirmation of a particular type of masculine identity. As Coe has argued, tattoos, in these contexts, serve to forge and reinforce male alliances, identifying individuals as members of a cohesive group with a shared set of values.
This is indicated by the fact that males who are members of the same group tend to acquire similar, if not identical, design motifs that utilize similar colors and are placed on the same parts of the body. Not only does the tattoo serve as a badge of male identity, but the process of its acquisition also contributes to the sense of male bonding, as men in the same platoon or gang often acquire their tattoos at the same time. The actual process of tattooing thus serves as a type of initiation rite in which individual men have the sense of being inducted into a particular community. The stoic endurance of pain is integral to this experience, being seen as a proof of one's manhood. Paradoxically, while the acquisition of tattoos has been seen as an affront to bourgeois values, challenging Judeo-Christian beliefs about the sanctity of the body and its inviolability, at the same time, the sense of masculinity that such tattoos affirm is a very conservative one based on patriarchal values. This is clearly revealed in the type of iconography that predominates in tattoos among the biker, prisoner, and military groups. As DeMello has observed, the most popular designs amongst servicemen have been patriotic motifs such as flags or eagles, naval emblems such as ships and anchors, sea themes (mermaids, dolphins, and whales), and "girlie tattoos" (nude women, hula dancers, harem girls, sailor girls, cowgirls, and geisha girls). The girls have traditionally been patterned after stereotypical female icons, such as the Gibson girl or the Mandarin girl from the movie The world of Suzie Wong. Many of these tattoos have been of barebreasted women or women in sexually subservient poses.
Classic biker tattoos include Harley Davidson motorcycles and emblems, V-twin engines, club logos, marijuana leaves, swastikas, knives, skulls, aggressive animals, and antisocial slogans. This symbolism of a virile masculinity has been reinforced by the style and placement of these tattoos. Usually, they use bold lines and are placed in prominent areas of the body where they can be easily seen. In the military, the primary areas to get tattooed have been the back, chest (and/or stomach), biceps, forearms (front, side, and back), and both sides of the calves, while the more obscure areas such as the thighs, sides of the body, and under the arms are usually ignored. Biker tattoos are also located on easily visible areas of the body, again highlighting their role as a public assertion of machismo. They tend to be on the arms, back, chest, hands, and head (very few on the legs, as bikers wear jeans when riding). The conception of masculinity represented by these tattoos is not only one that subjugates the feminine and the nonheterosexual, but also expunges the "primitive." The practice of wearing tattoos in the West first became popular among sailors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of their contact with tribal cultures, where tattooing was a long-standing tradition. During the first half of the twentieth century, however, tribal motifs all but disappeared from Western tattoos. In their place, a new "homegrown" tradition of iconography, using mostly symbols derived from Western culture, developed amongst the largely working class clientele who adopted them. During this time, the only non-European cultures to exercise a significant influence over Western tattooing were the Chinese and Japanese traditions, with motifs such as dragons, Chinese characters, and tigers being the most popular.
Thus, what could have been a symbol of cultural exchange ended up as a sign of a defensive and bounded masculinity that disavowed its connections with "savage" cultures. Therefore, while tattooing in the first half of the twentieth century grew out of a need to reclaim a sense of control over one's destiny in situations where one's life was subjected to external disciplinary regimes, such as those of the military or prison, it was based on a patriarchal conception of masculinity that suppressed the feminine, the nonheterosexual, and the primitive. At the same time as tattoos provided a protective carapace for those who embraced them, it also sealed them off from communication with other marginalized or disempowered groups. During the 1970s, however, this hypermasculine symbolism of tattoos began to be undermined with the growing popularity of tattoos amongst gay men, women, and the middle class. Within the context of gay subcultures, tattoos, far from affirming phallocentric masculinity, were deployed as a means of subverting it. More particularly, tattoos were adopted as a way of liberating "repressed" urges and reclaiming the sensual self. Because of their physical, visceral nature, they were seen as a vehicle for heightening awareness of the sensuality of the body's surfaces. As such, they represented an antidote to Western culture's longstanding subordination of the body to the mind. While women in Western culture have traditionally been associated with the body, masculine identity has been predicated on a privileging of the rational and cognitive over the sensuous. This has served to perpetuate the subordination of women to men, and it has also resulted in the alienation of men from their physical selves. This bodily estrangement has been reinforced by male dress since the beginning of the nineteenth century, as Polhemus points out.
While female dress has frequently been designed to enhance and draw attention to the physicality of the body, male dress, on the contrary, has tended to deemphasize the body, as exemplified by the advent of the suit, which has been the white, middle class man's "uniform" for the last two hundred years. With the adoption of the suit, there was a shift away from the sensual display of the body, which had characterized the more decorative modes of male dress of earlier centuries, to a more austere and functional sartorial code which signaled rationality and sobriety-a process that dress theorist Flugel termed the "great masculine renunciation". In emphasizing the cerebral over the bodily, this mode of dress was taken to be indicative of the assumed superiority of the masculine over the feminine and the primitive. With reference to the latter, Polhemus writes: "European colonists literally embodied their presumed superiority in their ‘rational' and ‘civilized' appearance, in contrast to the ‘primitive' body decorations and ‘absurd' frivolity of non-European male styles". In the process, however, men lost touch with the physicality of their own bodies. The resurgence of popularity in tattoos during the 1970s, then, can be seen as a desire by men to reconnect with their physical selves.
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