Americans are inked these days. The stigma associated with tattoos is long gone, as is the idea that they fly in the face of polite Western society. More than a quarter of American adults have at least one tattoo, and they’re especially popular among those born during the 1970s and later. Tattoos communicate identity and belonging, and for some, faith.
With that in mind, researchers at Baylor University and Texas Tech University recently published a study about religious tattoos at Baylor, the largest Baptist university in the world. Kevin Dougherty is a co-author and an associate professor of sociology at Baylor University. He says religious tattoos indicate a major shift in how the faithful feel about marking their body.
“For a long time in the United States, religion acted as a deterrent to tattoos, ” Dougherty says. “For generations of Americans, the idea of a tattoo as an acceptable means of communication and a self-expression was really foreign.”
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He says tattoos used to be associated with men, not women, and with sailors and with those who were incarcerated. Now, Dougherty says he sees them all over college campuses, especially at Baylor.
Researchers looked at how often religious tattoos were outward-facing versus inward- or self-facing. They found that religious tattoos were more often designed to be seen by the person wearing them. For example, the owner would have a tattoo on their forearm written or oriented in a way that’s only legible to them.
“In addition to being a proclamation of identity, the religious tattoo seems to be a reminder of identity, a way for an individual to encourage themselves to think about identity, maybe to think about acting in accordance with their own religious convictions and beliefs, ” Dougherty says.
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Religious tattoo preferences also fell along gender lines, Dougherty says. Men preferred larger tattoos on more visible places like the upper arm. Religious tattoos on women tended to be smaller and on less conspicuous places like their wrist, foot or back – “places that can be covered with clothing, ” Dougherty says.
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In this article, we study women’s tattoos from a lived religion perspective. We describe how women’s tattoos express their inner lives, the religious dynamics associated with tattooing, and how they negotiate them with others. The sample used came from surveys and interviews targeting tattooed women at a confessional college on the East Coast of the United States. Women appropriate a prevalent cultural practice like body art to express their religious and spiritual experiences and ideas. It can be a Catholic motto, a Hindu or Buddhist sign, or a reformulated goddess, but the point is that women use tattoos to express their inner lives. We found that women perceive workplace culture as a hostile space for them to express their inner lives through tattoos, while they are comfortable negotiating their tattoos with their religious traditions. And they do so in a Catholic university.
Tattooing is a social phenomenon whose cultural meaning is in flux (Silver et al. 2011). While, in the middle of the twentieth century, tattoos were considered a sign of marginal individuals and societies (Bell 1999; De Mello 2000), nowadays, they have become accepted, even becoming a fashion trend. As much as clothing and hairstyles, tattoos shape human bodies’ symbolic cultural capital, a project whereby individuals produce their appearance, choosing from a given cultural set of tools (Silver et al. 2011). Tattoos may be tools to challenge social mandates and exercise creativity and agency; however, class, race, and gender condition them (Dann et al. 2016).
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At the beginning of the twenty-first century, researchers found, for the first time in Western societies, a correlation between tattoos and a positive image, even among people who did not have tattoos themselves (Armstrong et al. 2002). In 2012, two in ten Americans got a tattoo, a number that increased to three in ten by 2019, when those under the age of 55 were twice as likely to have at least one tattoo (IPSOS 2019). However, scholars point out that the association between tattoos and deviance is still present in a different way. More than the tattoos themselves, what is associated with deviance today is the type and location of the tattoo (Silver et al. 2011).
Tattoos have been studied as signs of memberships in risky professions or criminal cliques and as ethnic identity markers (Bell 1999; Galera and López Fidanza 2012; Sims 2018; Walzer Moskovic 2015). Here, we understand them as cultural creations, generated within a given context. We look at tattoos as manifestations of a human culture that occupy a niche as a potential expression of an inner experience (Leader 2016; Naudé et al. 2017).
While Dann et al. (2016) explore tattoos through the intersection of gender and class, here, we look at them at the intersection of gender and lived religion. Studies show that, in the U.S., across every religious affiliation and demographic (age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status), women are more engaged with religious practices than their male counterparts. However, in comparison to men, women do not have equal access to leadership positions in their churches (Pearce and Gilliand 2020; Putnam and Campbell 2010). Without denying the paradox (more participation, less power), we will explore women’s religiosity from a lived religion perspective. A “lived religion” perspective (Ammerman 2014, 2020; McGuire 2008) assumes that everyday religious practices by ordinary persons are not limited by institutional mandates. It understands religion as a space where subjects exercise their autonomy and produce and reproduce signs and meaning, through cultural idioms that are available to them, not limited by their religious confessions. Lived religion is what ordinary people do when they do religion in their daily lives. This approach allows us to look beyond institutional structures, permitting us to see the actors’ capacity to produce and express religious meaning in daily life, turning our attention to the embodied, discursive, and material dimensions of life (like tattoos), where sacred things are being produced, encountered, and shared (Ammerman 2020; Bender et al. 2013; Edgell 2012; McGuire 2008; Meyer and Houtman 2012; Morello 2019a; Morello et al. 2017; Rabbia et al. 2019; Salas and De la Torre 2020; Williams 2015).
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Religiosity shapes and is shaped by historical circumstances and local cultures; religious practices occur within a repertoire of available cultural practices (Ammerman 2020). Today, for younger generations, tattoos have become a practice that is not only culturally available but also socially accepted, and a practice through which they can express their inner quest. Since the work of Émile Durkheim ([1915] 1965), sociologists have been studying tattoos as part of religious experiences, a form of self-expression that enables respondents to project who they are, and to tell a story about their life journey, where they have been, and what experiences have defined them (Barras and Saris 2020; Dougherty and Koch 2019; Naudé et al. 2017). For younger people, tattoos may be used to express a passage into adulthood, a spiritual threshold that establishes a sense of self (Dann et al. 2016).
In this article, we explore tattoos as expressions of college women’s inner lives, a venue for women to manifest their religious, spiritual experiences. What can we learn about college women’s lived religion by studying their tattoos?
There is a long tradition of religious tattoos (Morello 2021; Petkoff 2018) that might have started with Otzi “the iceman”, a 5250-year-old mummified male with 61 tattoos, discovered in 1991, although we do not know if any of them were religious. Closer to our times, in his study of the basic forms of religious life, Durkheim mentioned
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