"Why have blank, uninteresting skin when you can adorn it with color and pattern?"
- Hayley Hayes.
"It's like reading a diary you kept as a child, years after you have written the words."
- Amanda Burzio.
"I am a PhD-educated art historian. My doctoral thesis was on tattoos as art. I find the very concept of tattoos having 'meaning' a problematic one. The framing of this question - which presumes tattoos do have a meaning - encourages the construction of a plausible narrative even for tattoos which might 'mean' very little in simple, direct terms. Also, asking the question this way negates the fact that even when a tattoo does have a meaning, that meaning can change over time, or be obscure even to the person upon whose body it is tattooed. Some of them are, almost literally, meaningless as far as I'm concerned - the tattooists who produced them had more at stake in their symbolic message than I did. A better question, perhaps, is 'What does being tattooed mean to you?'. Being tattooed is an expression of my own history, my passion for tattoos and my commitment to and love for the art form. I'm a collector."
- Dr Matthew Lodder.
http://www.londontattoosbook.com