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INKEDblog takes you beneath the skin of today's tattoo culture. Our mission is to celebrate tattooing as a modern art form which incorporates art, fashion, style, and pop culture. While paying homage and respect to the past, we look to present a contemporary take on the present and future of skin art.
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Friday Mar 31, 2006
Every BODY Has a Story: Bar Code
"After my nineteenth birthday, I decided to get a tattoo. I knew this girl from high school named Mariya who was a wonderful artist and had become a tattoo artist since finishing high school.
We had hung out in the same crowd in Modesto, California in school, and we had known each other for a long time. Mariya did the art for about 90% of all the publications our school put out, so I was totally familiar with her work. She had always done art all of the time I knew her.
Mariya was sort of against the bar code. She is a devout Christian, and the idea of it bothered her. It’s been funny seeing how her ideas about this have changed as she continues her business, but that’s how she felt then.
As for me, I wanted to get the bar code because I felt like another number. At the time I was working for an inventory company, scanning products day in, day out. It occurred to me that if I had a bar code, my employer could just scan me too, and save a little more time.
I think it was sort of a socioeconomic thing for me too. I worked since I was about sixteen, and in Modesto, it was really hard to get a good job. I had waited a month or more to get a job at McDonalds. I realized that it took half of my income to pay for my apartment, and I was still getting a ton of taxes taken out. So the bar code was kind of ironic: I’m already the property of my employer and the government, why pretend otherwise?
The actual code used in the tattoo was from a CD in the shop. I actually don’t even remember which one now. I guess it’s not what your code is that’s important, it’s that you have one."
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