archives of ink and flesh
on tattoos as archival objects
I got my first tattoo in September 2021, at a small shop in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The design is simple—a plain black outline of the Hindu-Urdu word आज़ादी (azadi), meaning “freedom,” in the handwriting of one of my closest friends from university. The tattoo is about an inch tall and two and a half inches wide, its placement on the inside of my left forearm intentionally located to be visible most of the time but easily hidden if needed. Though I was in and out of the shop in less than half an hour, in actuality the process of getting the tattoo took far longer than that—my parents had not taken kindly at first to the thought of me permanently marking my body with ink, and after our initial argument I decided to give them a few months to warm to the idea before I actually went through with it.
My decision to get a tattoo was, first and foremost, an aesthetic one—I’ve always loved the way ink looks on skin, the way it weathers and fades as the tattoo itself ages with its wearer. There was also, if I’m being entirely honest with myself, a certain aspirational element, a longing to be admitted into a club of people who were cool and confident enough to make such a permanent commitment. But beyond these more superficial motivations, my decision was also one of deep personal significance, stemming from a desire to immortalize a period of transformation and awakening in my values and identity that played a major role in shaping who I am as a person. By preserving and chronicling this moment in my life, one could argue that my tattoo functions in its own way as an archival document of sorts, its indelible silhouette stamped on skin rather than paper.
In recent years, an increasing amount of scholarly attention (particularly among queer and feminist thinkers) has been devoted to the idea of the body as an archive. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Susan Stryker characterizes humans’ presence in our bodies as an “ongoing process of becoming, rather than a mere static material existence”—a process of “archiving” in which “[the] lived body materializes its historical and psychical contours over time.” Viewed through this lens, the physical landscape of the body—both inside and out—can be read as an archive of our lived experiences. Writing in the context of dance performances, in which the dancer’s body serves as an archive for the works of other performance artists and choreographers, André Lepecki eloquently concludes that “the body is archive and archive a body.”
Of course, the body differs from ‘traditional’ archives in the sense that unlike these repositories, where archivists intentionally select documents for inclusion or exclusion, the bodily archive tends to be composed for the most part of objects that arrived there by accident. For example, though the scar on my right wrist serves as an object in my body archive, documenting the time I fell off my scooter as a young child, the only decision involved in putting it there was my decision to swerve in order to avoid hitting a mailbox. One exception to this rule, however, is the tattoo—an intentional modification of the body’s surface, quite literally inscribing a message (whether significant or frivolous) onto it. The decision an individual makes of whether or not to immortalize an event, feeling, or memory with a tattoo is, in many ways, analogous to the decision an archivist makes of whether a given document is worth preserving in the archive.
In the same way that paper identity documents are frequently included in ‘traditional’ archives, tattoos can and should be read as identifying documents that form part of a body archive. They have, in fact, long functioned as markers of both identification and identity, particularly in the West—in nineteenth-century Europe, tattoos “became part of the practice that emerged in conjunction with the documentation of identity, for example, in connection to the development of passports, identification cards and birth certificates in a legal context.” As Swedish scholars Kristina Sundberg and Ulrika Kjellman argue, the tattoo serves as a “document taking an active part in the construction and reflection of an individual’s identity, experience, actions and status,” and the amalgamation of tattoos on an individual’s body thus “function as a both abstract and tangible archive, a composition of memories and evidence relating to events, actions and motives.” Conceptualizing tattoos as “a collection of documents displayed on a human body,” Sundberg and Kjellman contend that “since the documents, i.e., the tattoos, are bound to the individual body,” the body itself is turned into “a personal archive, a biography of sorts.”
The azadi tattoo on my arm functions as an archival document in more ways than one. The word choice for my first tattoo was not a decision that I made lightly, and I wanted to choose something whose significance could encapsulate, in just a few words at most, the core of my political value system—a value system which holds as the liberation of all oppressed people as its most fundamental tenet. I chose the word azadi in part because of its elegant simplicity, but also because of its multifaceted significance across a wide range of cultures and political struggles. On the linguistic level, its power lies in the fact that as a Persian loanword, it exists in both Hindi, the official language of India, and Urdu, the official language of Pakistan—both mutually intelligible registers of the Hindustani language. Transcending the violence of arbitrary borders and petty nationalisms, azadi is a word that refuses to be partitioned.
On a more concrete level, azadi is also a word with immense significance for political struggles across South Asia. Though the word first gained popularity in Pakistani feminist movements, perhaps its best-known usage is in the Kashmiri freedom struggle, where the chant Hum kya chahtey? Azadi!—What do we want? Freedom!—has, since the 1990s, remained a recurring feature of protests demanding Kashmir’s liberation from Indian and Pakistani occupation. The slogan is, as Indian writer Arundhati Roy puts it, “the refrain within a set of lyrics that describes people’s anger, their dream, and the battle ahead.” In more recent years, however, the cry of azadi has reverberated outward, across borders and barbed wire, into the streets and college campuses of India itself.
In late 2019 and early 2020, when India’s far-right government introduced the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a citizenship law that many warned was a slippery slope to depriving Indian Muslims of their citizenship, tens of thousands of Indians—in particular, students and young people—took to the streets in protest. The protests were brutally suppressed by the government, their leaders persecuted and imprisoned using the same laws and instruments of state repression that the British used to suppress anticolonial resistance during the freedom struggle—yet another historical fight by oppressed peoples raising the demand of azadi. The word quickly became a ubiquitous refrain during the anti-CAA demonstrations, including in parts of India where Hindi is not the predominant language. Given its associations with Kashmiri separatism, Yogi Adityanath—the Hindu extremist monk who has served since 2017 as the chief minister of India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state—declared that raising the slogan would be considered by his government as an act of treason.
These developments played a pivotal role in shaping my relationship to my homeland—not only shattering the illusions that I had built up after nineteen years of viewing India through the rose-tinted glasses of diaspora, but also compelling me to reconnect with my roots in a way that I never had before, asserting my identity as an Indian and deepening my relationship to my mother country so that I could more meaningfully resist its capture by the forces of hate and fascism. On some level, I suppose my choice of azadi as the slogan for my first tattoo was about more than just political self-expression—it was also about documenting this profound personal transformation, securing its permanent inclusion in the archive of my body.
“In the end,” writes Julietta Singh in her book No Archive Will Restore You, our bodies are not “bounded, contained subjects,” but rather “ones filled up with foreign feelings and vibes that linger and circulate in space, that enter us as we move through our lives.” We document these traces of our human experience in different ways—visibly, invisibly, intentionally, unintentionally—but we document them nonetheless, cataloguing and storing them away in the vast repositories of information that are our bodies. Tattoos are just one way that we contribute to the body archive, chronicling events and memories and feelings by etching them permanently onto the body’s surface. Each tattoo on a person’s body is a document; taken together, a collection of tattoos is a chronicle—an archive of ink and flesh, preserving and immortalizing an indelible record of body and self.
no more mangoes is a blog by Pranay Somayajula, a London-based fiction writer and essayist. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox:
Your post has made me look at tattoos and the word azadi afresh. Never saw tattoos as archival elements ... it’s such a powerful thought to do that! Azadi as a word is used / abused quite loosely here in India ... to see it as possibly the only term that remains undivided post partition says a lot about the power of such a short, simple, unassuming word. The layers that it has are astounding. Thanks for giving some food for thought to chew on. Maybe I’ll just go get a tattoo myself. :-)