On the human canvas: a novel ontology of tattoos

Abstract

Some tattoos are artworks. This paper claims that art-tattoos have an interesting ontological feature: their artistic properties are partially determined by the people they are tattooed on. In other words, tattoos are artistically contextualized by their recipients. I further suggest that this contextualization is ongoing: that the artistic properties of a tattoo aesthetically change over time as the tattoo recipient changes. I present an ontology of tattoos that focuses on this feature of tattoos. The argument in this paper notably rests on an inference from aesthetic intuitions and art-historical facts about tattoos to claims about their ontological features.