ABSTRACT
This chapter deals primarily with the body that has been volitionally tattooed or pierced, scarred and impregnated with surgically implanted non-human extensions such as coral horns and metal sub-dermal objects. Tattooing's capacity to make philosophy re-address issues of bodies as intensity and momentum is where its contestation of sites of power is oriented. Deleuze and Guattari claim Paintings, tattoos, or marks on the skin embrace the multidimensionality of bodies'. The fissure between theorist/sociologist and tattooed subject often presents a tattooed subject as irreconcilable with her or his capacity to know the motivations for tattooing. The permanence of tattooing comes into question when the meanings ascribed to an image are not fixed. Theoretically, tattooing is available to most genders, races and cultures. A tattooed body cannot necessarily be defined as belonging to the collective body of other tattooed bodies, or as only not the non-tattooed body.
