ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the transcultural/transnational history of American tattooing, produced and reproduced in the narratives of both tattoo artists and tattoo scholars, revealed in terms of a conceptual reflection on what it is exactly that we talk about when we talk about something as a form of cultural mobility. In other words, the dissemination of tattooing to and in the United States over the last two-and-a-half centuries was intended to create an awareness of the multiple dimensions of mobility, with dimensions referring to the modes of mobility itself; to the contextual arrangements in which mobility takes place; and, consequently; to the use of the word mobility in scholarly discourse. Modes of mobility can be manifold and, of course, are culturally as well as historically specific. Of particular relevance for the conceptualization of cultural mobility, then, might be the idea that this mobility is not necessarily bound to physical movement, at least not in the first place.
