how to walk like a tattooer

Last Thursday, I found myself in the Ekko bar, when Gonz, Luis, and Edwin from Tito’s Tattoos sauntered in. They stayed near the door, and there was part of me that wanted to go talk to them, but I didn’t want to appear to be some sort of groupie or something. They were on the couches in the vestibule, and I was just past the inner doorway by the bar. I played coy for a while, hoping they’d see me, but eventually when they wandered closer to replace their Paceña bottles with fresh ones, I tapped Gonz on the shoulder.

I expected a very cool, reserved response, but he actually got quite excited to see me. When I touched his shoulder, he slowly turned my direction, but upon recognizing me gave a little skip-like hop in my direction and gave me a hug.

This reaction surprised me. I expected something more reserved. More cool, calm, and collected. More “oh, I’m a cool tattoo dude, and you’re some gringa I’ve met twice before so I’ll say ‘hola’ and kiss you on the cheek, but no need to dwell.” But instead I got what felt like a genuinely excited reception. And I think the reason I expected something different, lies in the corporeality I’ve come to associated with the Tito’s guys.

Primarily meaning, Alé’s embodiment. He is calm and collected. Too cool, in many ways. Quiet, but brooding. He stands calmly, as if his feet are fastened to the floor and his chest is magnetized to the sky. His shoulders are back and down, as if he could wipe his hands across his chest and it would seem natural. He is slow and sustained. And a bit strained. He pulls his head back a little. He is tired. He is bored.

Edwin, the owner of Tito’s, is slow too. The way “cuando llegaste?” pulled out of his mouth the first time we saw each other this January, made an impression on me. Like taffy. Sweet and slow. But never overly enthusiastic. 

Diego, my first friend from Tito’s, is slow too, though with flourishes like Gonz, at times (though mostly out of anger). But he is heavy and tied to the ground. Diego, Edwin, & Alé all have a certain slowness. A liquidity. A gravity.

And Gonz in some ways is their opposite. He is jumpy, easily excited. He smiles wide and wags his hands. He moves his head forward when he listens. He has a weight to him. It is not as if he will float away at any moment. But one has the feeling that he could jump without warning, and land sloppily but with ease.

So all of this got the cogs in my brain turning, thinking about bodily movement. Marcel Mauss—perhaps the father of anthropological thought on embodied movement—suggested there is no "natural" way to walk, but only socially mediated and transmitted forms of moving. He called these learned forms of movement the "techniques of the body"-stances, postures, physical habits of body use that are acquired like language and that are equally communicative (1973). Patterns of action “do not just vary with individuals and their imitations, because “they vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties, and fashions, prestiges.” (1979:101). Bodily movement is learned. At times children are explicitly instructed in etiquette or manners, other times it is less explicit (but just as important). Indeed, from Goffman’s “Presentation of the Self” (1959) to Butler’s “performative repetition” (1999), one does not need to look hard to sociological explorations of the ways that bodily movement is not only learned but made to represent aspects of personhood, identity, or social position.

Perhaps one doesn’t need to theorize all this. Perhaps we all understand that the way one moves in the world says something about the person. She who walks with her head held high and a swagger in her step announces her confidence (and so much more), and we all understand. But I take time here to explain, because sometimes it is so seemingly natural that we barely notice. As Bourdieu explains: “When habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it finds itself ‘as fish in water’; it does not feel the weight of the water and takes the world about itself for granted” (in Wacquant 2004:43).

But as much as movement may seem natural, both the actor and the observer organize moves into meaningful action. I see the gravity and liquidity of most of the Tito’s guys and I interpret it as gestures toward “badass,” “too cool,” and “aloof.” In my head I hear Snoop Dog playing...

I cannot speak to what their motivations are (consciously constructed or subconsciously created), but David Best writes "One cannot specify an action, as opposed to a purely physical movement, without taking into account what the agent intended, that is there are reasons for, and purposes to, actions" (Best 1974:193). To put it in terms of Clifford Geertz’s interpretive anthropology, we must “sort winks from twitches and real winks from mimicked ones” (1973:16). That is to say, what I know or learn from their actions is not just about looking at physical movement, but includes understanding action in context (Best 1978:79). To understand body movement as socially relevant, its not just about “muscles, bones, and angles of displacement, locomotor patterns, or positional behaviors” (Prost 1996). Its about Bolivian chicos in their twenties, who for various reasons make a living as tattoo artists, entering a gringo bar. Their swagger is laden with the politics of language (they speak Spanish in an English speaking place in a Spanish speaking country). Their speaking patterns are influenced by cosmopolitanism and globalization of travel. It is about globalization of imagery and pop culture. It is about the fact that the sign outside the shop says “Tito’s Tattoos and Piercing,” not “Tito’s Tatuaje y Perforación.” It is about a performance of gender that is utterly globalized in ways that are far from uni-directional. No, it is about performances of gender that range from Megadeath tshirts to VW bugs. And it is about sexuality. It is very very much about sexuality.   

And as these factors mold the body, the body molds the person is as well. Our bodies are intimately implicated in our identities. Our race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, religious afiliation, political stances, and whatever else, may be written upon the body, but also mutually constitute the body as well. As Mauss wrote, the body is simultaneously the object upon which culture works, as well as the tool with which that work is achieved (1973).

So then, this all begs the question…do the Tito’s guys conceive tattooing as a mental creative process or as a physical skill? Most likely it’s a combination, but what is privileged? What is heightened and what is obscured? Which is the attractive part? And what does that tell us about embodiment?

Best, David
1974  Expression in Movement and the Arts. Lepus Books, London.

Butler, Judith
1999  Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.

Geertz, Clifford
1973  Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.    

Goffman, Erving
1959  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Prentice Hall.

Mauss, Marcel
1979  Sociology and Psychology: Essays. Ben Brewster, trans. Boston, MA: Routledge 1973  Techniques of the Body. Economy and Society 22(1):70-88.

Prost, J.H.
1996  Review Essay: Body Language in the Context of Culture. Visual Anthropology 8(2-4):337-43.

Wacquant, Loïc
2004 Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. New York: Oxford University Press.