The first tattoo I ever noticed was on the wrist of a Rabari woman in Kutch. The sun had just slipped behind the salt flats, and she was sitting outside her mud house, rolling tobacco with a calm so complete that time itself seemed to pause. Her wrist bore a peacock made of tiny blue-green dots. The pigment had faded, merging with the lines of age, but it still glowed faintly when the light caught it. Seeing my curiosity, she smiled and said, “These are my jewels. They will not leave me even when I die.”
That sentence has stayed with me for years. In it was an entire cosmology: permanence amidst impermanence, wealth that cannot be looted, beauty inseparable from being. Over the past decade, while working with communities across India, I have come to see tattoos not as decoration but as a living philosophy. In deserts, forests, and mountains, ink has recorded cosmologies, kinship, and devotion. In a time before archives, the body was the text.
Western anthropology once regarded tattoos as signs of “primitiveness.” The ethnographic gaze saw them as curiosities of the savage body rather than expressions of knowledge. Alfred Gell later challenged this view, proposing that tattooing be understood as “a technique of the body” and “an art of agency” (Gell, 1993). Michael Taussig (2006) went further, reading tattooing as an act of mimicry and resistance within colonial modernity. Both are vital, but when I began to listen to tattooed women in India, I found something even deeper: the tattoo as pedagogy, as the skin’s memory of belonging.
