Eric’s Ego Trip
Over a decade ago, when searching for a classic design for my next tattoo, I came across an image that startled me. A well-known 1950s British tattoo artist sat with his shirt off, a tattoo of a bullfight on his chest, and other tattoo artists were arrayed behind him. It is a conventional tattoo parlor photograph—layering messages of masculinity, muscularity, symbol, art, and body all in celebration of the moment when art meets flesh at the end of the tattoo gun. But there are other signifying systems in the photograph that most viewers would see but ignore. On the seated man’s chest, below his crude but classic tattoo of a bull being struck by a matador, are faint scars. They sit below the pectoral muscles and outline the lower chest. The man stares confidently into the camera, and the other tattoo artists embrace him into their fraternity of ink.
I looked long and hard at transgender, yet the ambiguity of the photograph remains, and stands as a marker of the secret histories of transgender identities. Given how rarely images of trans men appear in the historical archive, and given that when trans male images do appear, they are frequently read as depicting unmarked male bodies, what are the challenges and the opportunities embedded in staging a visual history of the trans male body?
