There are places in the world where diversity is no mere slogan or corporate policy, where it is simply the air you breathe, the natural language through which people recognise and respect one another. Tattoo conventions are one of these places. Perhaps the most authentic of all.
We’re just back from Frankfurt and Gods of Ink, four years of history and four hundred of the best artists in the world, and every time you step inside an event like this you get the same feeling: that you’ve entered a place where the rules of the outside world don’t count. Or rather, where the rules that apply here are those that the outside world is still struggling to take on board. The folks who take part in a tattoo convention come from all over the world. From the West Coast to the East Coast of the USA, Japan and Korea, Brazil and Eastern Europe. They come with their stories, styles, visual cultures. And nobody asks anybody to fit it. Quite the contrary: the more different you are, the more interesting you are. The more you bring something unique and truly yours, the more you have to give. It is perhaps the only creative environment where not only is the individual identity – in its most radical and visible form — accepted, but it becomes the very engine driving the system.
Because what is the profound essence of tattoo if not the transformation of the body into storytelling? Each bodysuit tells the story of a personal cosmogony. Each figure on skin is a manifesto of belonging, or a breaking away, or both of these things at the same time. There is no one right way to get tattooed, just like there is no one right way to be yourself. And the convention is where this truth materialises on the physical plane, where you walk it, breathe it. An example for the present times in which I am proud to take part in as active a way as I possibly can.
This year, more than ever, this dimension had a particular significance. The geopolitical tensions, cancelled flights, and prohibitive costs basically turned the act of travelling to Frankfurt into one of intentional presence. And yet many came all the same. Because Gods of Ink, like many tattoo events around the world, is more than just a trade fair: it’s a shared space worth defending, an interspace, you might say, where cultural and geographical distances dissolve before a tattoo machine.
To observe the people wandering among the stands at a convention is to see humanity about as free as it gets.
Heavyset or wiry bodies, light or dark skin, heads shaved or covered in dyed hair, faces tattooed or unmarked by ink, ranging in age from twenty to eighty. All there, side by side, united by the choice to use their body as language, free of convictions, religions or cultural arrogance. It strikes me that beauty does not have just one shape and above all, that respect, when genuine, has no need to be proclaimed: it stands out and speaks for itself.
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