EROTIC TATTOOS: Manufacturing Desire

A gay male might have run into a derriere emblazoned with "Open All Night". Some men sought out prostitutes who sported the most tattoos. The nature of the tattoos themselves didn't matter, it was the skin ink itself that turned the customer on.
If these tattoos were 'erotic', it wasn't due to their content, rather their placement below the panty line. Never mind that these tattoos were jokes, excitement emanated from the radical context of the human body as a medium of communication. Or the notion that erogenous zones could possess an attitude, especially a humorous one.
These days, the joke is just as likely be on the wearer. Santa Barbara tattooist, Pat Fish, was reluctant to ink a 'Gumby' on a girl's crotch. "Who wants their boy friend laughing every time he goes down on you?" says Pat, for whom the pelvic girdle is now a no-go zone. "I might do a delicate fish, but what happens when it expands with a woman's pregnancy? It becomes a whale. Or, if she loses weight, it shrinks to a sardine. Pat doesn't want her customers to regret their tattoo choices.
Erotic tattoos once had a respected place within many indigenous cultures, according to the authors of Art, Sex and Symbol. Tattoos ceremonies were rites of passage, replacing the more painful practices of circumcision and labia mutilation. Usually performed at the onset of puberty when sexual feelings are on the rise, the tattoo proved one's contempt of pain, which made him attractive to the opposite sex. If a Samoan girl required tattoos to be considered nubile (marriageable), then the tattoo was definitely a sexual lure. For Burmese boys, a leg tattoo might have been critical to attracting females. And Dyak women in Borneo are said to have taken tattoos for the singular purpose of turning on their lovers. The tribe might well have depended on it.

Culturally sanctioned erotica is unheard of in the West, with the possible exception of American servicemen, whose flags, anchors, and 'Sailor Jerry' pin-ups were part and parcel of the 'man in uniform'. Cartoonish though the nude girly figures were, women lusted after this eroticized military body, and a puritanical nation hardly blinked. If G.I. Joe had to be denied a sex life in order to defend his country, then his tattoos were his surrogate sex life. No one condemned them as autoerotic -- or even homoerotic -- although that's what they must have been. Tattoos, like the military uniform, were national symbols of which to be proud.