Positive social implications around body modification are an often poorly addressed or at least often overlooked aspect across many industry observers. Centered around individual interviews, primarily in Canada, the interpretations raised touch on the art forms’ practice globally. For example a sense of individualism alongside ones’ participation in a culture may be bolstered through tattooing thereby casts the implications of ‘getting inked’ in a far different light than simply relegating participants as outside the mainstream or somehow negatively separate from the non-tattooed

 
| ‘To voluntarily inflict pain on one’s body and mar the skin with everlasting symbols of impurity is described as overtly antisocial. Such interpretations ring with Judeo-Christian understandings of the body as a sacred “home,” and legitimate Western-scientific theories about tattoo enthusiasm prevalent since the turn of the 19th century.
 
Sociological analyses of tattooing produce a slightly broader spectrum of interpretation than psychological-medical. Yet despite Sanders’ (1989) and DeMello’s (2000) path-breaking analyses of tattooing as a contextual and negotiated signifier of identity, sociological statements on the cultural use of tattoos in North America ultimately (re)produce a conceptualization of the practice as contra-normative. The symbiotic relationship between tattooing and illegal behaviour (or otherwise unconventional lifestyles) still dominates in sociological research. Sociologists prefer to study the subversive subcultural uses of tattooing among groups such as prisoners and youth gangs. Examinations of everyday life in tattoo studios equally “verify” the disreputable nature of North American tattooing cultures. Tattooing is deconstructed as a signifying practice that purposefully embraces and promulgates images of Otherness. It is postulated to be part of what Willis (1978) calls a “homology” of deviant style, that is, a set of complementary group practices coalescing around a shared set of outsider ideologies, activities and representational preferences.
 
With apparent irreverence to Klesse’s (1999), Myers’ (1997), Mifflin’s (1997), Rosenblatt’s (1997), and Atkinson’s (2002; 2003a) claims that non-mainstream forms of body modification foster cultural bonds, few examine tattoos as pro-social markers. The nature of tattooing as a normative practice is rarely considered, because both the pathology of the act and actor is assumed. Reflective of this ongoing tradition of interpretation, there presently exists a giant schism between social scientific interpretations of tattooing and contemporary sensibilities about the act circulated by Canadian practitioners. The dominant manner of analysing tattoos in academic research may, however, be challenged by exploring several of the sensitizing principles of figurational sociology… | full article

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