Life & 6 Months: Investigating the Wellcome Trust's Tattoo Collection

December 14, 2012 2:11 PM

Academic, writer and tattooist Gemma Angel is in the final year of her doctorate: researching the three hundred preserved, tattooed pieces of human skin in the Wellcome Collection. Check out her website, Life & 6 Months, for writing on the tactile experience of handling the skins, how to find out which part of the body a sailor's "unseen" tattoo was on, and tattoo collectors in fiction.

Among other work, Angel writes history and culture features for Things & Ink magazine, the print version of tattoo blog th'ink.

The Wellcome Collection previously on MetaFilter.

posted by daisyk (13 comments total)

Very interesting, thanks for posting this!
posted by carter at 5:11 PM on December 14, 2012

Eye ass tattoos are/were a thing? Hunh.
posted by Diablevert at 5:41 PM on December 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Interesting. I know more than one person who has that tattoo on the backs of their skulls.
posted by 256 at 6:07 PM on December 14, 2012

Eye ass tattoos are/were a thing? Hunh.
posted by Diablevert

As are a "W" on each cheek (spells WoW when you bend over).
posted by 445supermag at 7:29 PM on December 14, 2012 [3 favorites]

445supermag, I feel like I should have worked that out for myself but somehow didn't, so thanks for pointing it out. :-)
posted by daisyk at 10:40 PM on December 14, 2012

I'd like to know how exactly the skins were collected. It seems like a touchy business.

Maybe the collector have a buddy at the morgue who alerted him when tattooed bodies were available.

There are other, more macabre possibilities that I started to type out but I'll stop with that one.
posted by bunderful at 6:38 AM on December 15, 2012

Had. Dammit.
posted by bunderful at 7:17 AM on December 15, 2012

For those who want a twist on the classic "Mom" tribute tattoo, you can use a pair M's. For a pop culture reference to the WoW see "Sammy and Rosie get laid".
posted by 445supermag at 8:05 AM on December 15, 2012

As are a "W" on each cheek (spells WoW when you bend over)

COD! NOW BOW FOR WORD BOG...GLE MODE. JOY!
posted by zippy at 12:49 PM on December 15, 2012

spells WoW when you bend over

And "MOM" when you stand on your head. If you are good at cartwheels, you can say "WOW MOM WOW!"

...or so I have been told.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:57 PM on December 15, 2012 [2 favorites]

WOW EOE MOM 303!

Where is Dan Brown to decode this?
posted by zippy at 2:05 PM on December 15, 2012 [3 favorites]

In one of the links to my last post, Ramón Chao talks about getting tattoos and wanting to have his skin preserved. Here's the relevant bit.
posted by Kattullus at 2:24 PM on December 15, 2012

Fascinating. The whole tattooed skin as art thing reminds me of one of Roald Dahl's more macabre short stories, Skin.
posted by Albondiga at 3:15 PM on December 15, 2012