Tattoos and Armenia

Tattoos in European culture have often represented stepping outside the boundaries of society, whether to indicate bravery, piety (Armenian Christians used to mark themselves to show they had made an important pilgrimage), impiety… machismo… or simply eccentricity. [Victoria Finlay, Colour, p.359]

More fascinating details and stories hinted at there by Finlay’s super book. However, my critical mind can’t help but notice that Armenia is not exactly a European culture (its shared Christian culture does not make it European since its church predates any medieval or modern sense of ‘Europe’ and was all but inaccessible to Western Europeans during its formative years and the even more rambunctious formative years of Europe) which may undermine Finlay’s point about European tattooing habits until the last few decades, anyway. Which makes me ask, what is the history of the European tattoo?

colour is not sitting still

For some reason it is easier to understand this idea of electromagnetic waves actually altering what they touch when you are talking about invisible ones like x-rays. It is hard to believe that light - lovely friendly white light - also changes almost every object it hits...

The best way I've found of understanding this is to think not so much of something 'being' a colour but of 'doing a colour'. The atoms in a ripe tomato are busy shivering - or dancing or singing; the metaphors can be a joyful as the colours they describe - in such a way that when white light falls on them they absorb most of the blue and yellow light and they reject the red - meaning paradoxically that the red tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red.

Victoria Finley, Colour: Travels through the Paintbox (Sceptre, 2002), page 6.