Morbid Ink: Field Notes on the Human Memorial Tattoo and Memorialisation During a Pandemic: An Illustrated Live Zoom Lecture by Dr. John Troyer
Date: Monday, May 18
Time: 7 pm EDT
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE.
This lecture will take place virtually, via Zoom. Ticket sales will end at 5 pm EDT the day of the lecture, after which a link to the conference will be emailed to ticketholders. Ticketholders may request a video recording AFTER the lecture takes place by emailing proof of purchase to info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com.
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How do we remember the dead during a Pandemic? What even is a Memorial or Monument to the dead?
In 1891, Samuel F. O’Reilly of New York, NY patented the first “…electromotor tattooing-machine,” a modern and innovative device that permanently inserted ink into the human skin. O’Reilly’s invention revolutionized tattooing and forever altered the underlying concept behind a human tattoo, i.e., the writing of history on the body. Tattooing of the body most certainly predates the O’Reilly machine (by several centuries) but one kind of human experience remains constant in this history: the memorial tattoo.
Memorial tattooing is, as Marita Sturken discusses the memorialization of the dead, a technology of memory. Yet the tattoo is more than just a representation of the dead. It is a historiographical practice in which the living person seeks to make death intelligible by permanently altering his or her own body. In this way, memorial tattooing not only establishes a new language of intelligibility between the living and the dead, it produces a historical text carried on the historian’s body.
A memorial tattoo is an image but it is also (and most importantly) a narrative.
Human tattoos have been described over the centuries as speaking scars and/or the true writing of savages; cut from the body and then collected by Victorian-era gentlemen. These intricately inked pieces of skin have been pressed between glass and then hidden away in museum collections, waiting to be re-discovered by the morbidly curious. The history of tattooing is the story of Homo sapiens’ self-invention and unavoidable ends. Tattoo artists have a popular saying within their profession: Love lasts forever but a tattoo lasts six months longer.
Dr. John Troyer is the Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. He is a co-founder of the Death Reference Desk website, the Future Cemetery Project and a frequent commentator for the BBC. His new book Technologies of the Human Corpse was published by The MIT Press on April 28, 2020. He grew up in the American funeral industry.
Photo of memorial tattoo by Dan Santoro, courtesy of the artist.