Ambrogia Cereda

The article analyses the meaning of tattooing as a form of narration. Introducing the body as a text that can convey different forms of thought (derived both from philosophy and from sociology), the author maintains that the body modification is today as an open and living work whose interpretation has an influence on the individual identity and can be changed by means of the interaction with others. A thumbnail sketch of the history of the practice among traditional communities up to contemporary society is drawn to provide a series of fundamental usages for the inscription of the body. The concern here is to show tattooing as an expression of the whole individual (no longer divided into mind vs. body) and of his own perceived identity, underlying the relation of the chosen symbols (and of the symbolic ritual) with society, which remains the main source offering forms of representation and the main stage for the construction of identity. So that the whole final text can be read as the result of a process where the authorship is shattered among the society itself.