I still have ribbons, and post its and chits from boarding school.

Not heirlooms, not particularly valuable objects, not the kind of things anybody would carefully preserve for future generations. Just ribbons tied to the edge of an old bunk bed, photographs from school functions, scraps of paper covered in embarrassingly earnest motivational quotes, tiny relics from versions of myself that no longer exist.

My Thatha carried his archive in diaries.

As his eyesight began to fail, I would sit beside him and write while he dictated phone numbers, addresses, and names. Every page contained contact information. Every margin held a note. Every diary became a map of relationships accumulated over decades.

Via: Past Cart, Vintage telephone diary

My Pati carried her archive differently.

While Tata documented people, Pati documented patterns. Her notebooks were filled with kolam designs, page after page of geometry, repetition, experimentation, and practice. Looking back, they feel less like household notebooks and more like sketchbooks. They were records of attention. Records of somebody making beautiful things because making beautiful things mattered.

Every generation leaves something behind.

via: Pavish Ulagam, Pinterest. Example of kolam design

Diaries, recipes, photographs, letters, pattu podavais. Objects that survive long enough to tell us who somebody was.

Which is why I find myself returning to a simple question.

How do we keep things from disappearing?

The digital age promised us the largest archive in human history. Instead, it often feels like we are building our lives on rented land, on an unstable foundation. 

Entire communities disappear when platforms change. Years of work vanish behind forgotten passwords. Artists spend countless hours creating, only to find themselves at the mercy of algorithms they do not control.

Every day, I see artists asking people to save, share, comment, and engage so their work can remain visible for a little longer.

Visibility is not the same thing as preservation.

An algorithm decides what gets seen today.

An archive decides what gets remembered tomorrow.

That distinction became impossible to ignore while building this project.

Over the past 6 months, we spoke to more than one hundred women and gender-diverse tattoo artists across India and beyond. Some run studios, some work independently, some travel between cities carrying their practice with them. Many built careers in spaces that were never designed for them in the first place.

And yet, despite the significance of what they are doing, very few of their stories exist anywhere outside social media. Their work may be displayed, their stories have not been. 

That is important to note not because these artists are disappearing, but because their stories deserve more than captions and temporary visibility.

What would happen if nobody documented this moment?

What would happen if nobody recorded the fact that women, queer artists, independent artists, travelling artists, and self-taught artists were actively reshaping tattoo culture in India?

Via: Sara Rawlinson for Queen's Old Library

The work might survive although context might not.

Future generations might see the tattoos without understanding who made them, how they worked, or what they were building.

This project began as a way of documenting artists. Eventually, it became something larger. It became an attempt to document a culture while it is still unfolding.

A book felt like the right medium for that.

Not because books are superior to websites or because we think print is more valuable than digital media.

But because books ask something different from us.

They ask us to slow down. They ask us to spend time with a story.

They remain discoverable long after a trend has passed.

Most importantly, they create encounters that feel fundamentally human.

We imagine this book being passed between friends on a picnic blanket in Cubbon Park. We imagine people flipping through artists together, arguing about whose work they love most, discovering styles they never knew existed, finding artists they eventually choose to tattoo them.

We imagine temporary tattoos being shared, worn, discussed, and exchanged. We imagine people finding artists they would never have discovered through an algorithm.

Because that is another thing archives can do.

They don’t just preserve culture or this particular moment in time, they create new relationships with it.

Until a few years ago, I did not know queer tattoo artists existed.

I did not know there were artists working from home studios, that there were artists creating intentionally safer spaces for women and queer clients. I did not know there were so many people building alternatives to the traditional structures and studios I thought were the only option.

Discovery changes possibility.

The moment you see someone like yourself doing something you did not know was possible, the world becomes slightly larger.

This matters in creative fields, especially for people who are constantly told what they should be doing instead.

The artists in this archive are not only making tattoos. They are building communities,  creating spaces, choosing different ways of living.

Every day, they exercise the right to create something with their hands, on their own terms, in a world increasingly optimized for speed, scale, and sameness. That is worth preserving.

Via: Anjali Upadhyay, Pinterest. Trinket box with letters, postcards etc. 

Not because tattoo culture is disappearing.

But because culture only survives when somebody decides it is worth recording, this is how we’re choosing to do it. 

One hundred artists and their one hundred stories.

One small attempt to keep something from disappearing.

If you had to preserve one piece of culture from your community for the next fifty years, what would it be?