One of the stranger things about working on this archive has been realising how often conversations about tattooing eventually stop being about tattooing.

You begin by asking someone about linework, or why they prefer a particular machine, or how they developed a visual style. An hour later you're discussing family expectations, migration, caste, queerness, grief, religion, gender, visibility, loneliness, money, illness, survival, and the thousand different ways people learn to inhabit their own bodies.

Somewhere over the last six months, after speaking to nearly 200 artists from across India, I began noticing a pattern.

Many of the people doing the work that interested us most were also people who had spent a significant portion of their lives negotiating what other people thought their bodies should be.

Women. Queer people. Gender-diverse people. People from communities that have historically existed outside centres of cultural power. People whose appearance, ambitions, identities, careers, relationships or choices had been questioned at some point or another.

Not universally, of course. Tattooing belongs to everyone, but the overlap was difficult to ignore.

And it made me think about the history of tattooing itself.

A lot of contemporary conversations around tattooing in India begin somewhere around the early 2000s, usually with the rise of commercial studios and the growing visibility of tattoo culture online. The implication is often that tattooing arrived here through globalisation, celebrity culture, Western influence or changing ideas of self-expression.

But tattooing has existed across the subcontinent for much longer than contemporary studio culture.

Long before Instagram portfolios and convention booths, tattooing existed in villages, forests, nomadic communities, domestic spaces and ritual spaces. 

Across regions of India, women marked skin with motifs connected to kinship, protection, spirituality, memory, labour and belonging. Godna traditions in central India, Pachakuthu traditions in the South, tattooing practices among Adivasi communities and countless regional variations existed long before tattooing became something associated with contemporary aesthetics.

What interested me while researching these histories was not simply that tattooing existed, but was who was carrying these traditions.

Again and again, women appeared as practitioners, knowledge keepers and transmitters of the craft. In some communities tattooing was performed by specialist women who travelled between villages. In others it formed part of everyday cultural life. The work was not always considered prestigious. It was not always documented and yet it persisted.

The closer I looked, the more tattooing began to feel like a history of people working outside official histories altogether.

Because the story of tattooing in India is also entangled with caste.

There were periods where permanent marking carried very different meanings depending on who was being marked and why. Certain communities wore tattoos as identity, protection or cultural continuity, while elsewhere bodily marking could function as a tool of social categorisation and exclusion. The body itself became a site where hierarchy was written, read and enforced.

Which is perhaps why contemporary tattooing feels so interesting.

The meaning of the mark has changed.

The same act that once identified community, caste, occupation or social position has increasingly become a way for people to claim authorship over their own bodies.

Not just because tattoos are inherently rebellious. Most tattooed people are remarkably ordinary. They pay rent, forget emails, make tea, fight with their parents and spend too much time doom-scrolling like everyone else.

But there is still something quietly significant about choosing what remains on your skin.

Especially when other people have spent years telling you what should.

Throughout this project, I found myself returning to conversations with queer and gender-diverse artists in particular. Not because their experiences were identical, but because many of them spoke about tattooing in ways that extended beyond aesthetics.

They spoke about dysphoria, about visibility, about learning to recognise themselves.

They spoke about creating spaces where nervousness could exist openly rather than being hidden behind performance, and mostly about connection.

Sometimes the tattoo itself felt almost secondary to the process of arriving there.

That observation feels especially important right now.

Over the last decade, gender-diverse people in India have been forced into increasingly exhausting conversations about legitimacy, recognition and existence itself. Legal protections have expanded in some ways and failed in others. Public visibility has increased alongside hostility. Every gain seems accompanied by another debate over whether certain people should be allowed to exist comfortably at all.

And yet the artists in this archive continue building.

They continue opening studios,  continue travelling,  tattooing, making work, finding one another and forming such a community. 

That persistence matters.

Because one of the things this project has shown me is that tattooing has never really belonged to people interested in conformity.

The medium itself attracts individuals who are willing to imagine different possibilities for themselves. Sometimes those possibilities are artistic. Sometimes they are personal. Sometimes they are political. Most often they are all three at once.

When we began this project, we thought we were looking for 100 artists.

What we found instead was a much larger story about who gets remembered, who gets documented, whose labour becomes visible and whose histories are allowed to survive.

This archive cannot contain all of it, no archive ever could tell every story.

Kolam, Pachakuthu style via Swasthi Iyengar (@gunga_ma)

But if it succeeds at anything, I hope it serves as evidence that these artists were here, that they were building extraordinary lives and practices across cities, towns, villages and studios throughout the country, and that the history of tattooing in India has always been far more complicated, diverse and human than most people realise.

The needle carries history.

The people holding it are shaping what comes next.

What was your first reaction to knowing that tattooing is inherent to most old cultures? How did that change your current views of tattoos?