Desenho corporal – Tatuagem: uma linguagem de inclusão social

Abstract

This study has, as research and analysis corpus, the tattoo, as a form of body design used by socially-free people and by those serving sentences of imprisonment - prisoners. Because of the literature gap about the tattoos as identification element and by the gap of scientific studies to look into the codes used by free people or by inmates serving sentences for crimes committed, data were selected from photographs taken in the period from 2009 to 2011, in academic places, among professional tattooists and into a criminal set of Feira de Santana city, what makes this work be unpublished in Bahia, justifying its development. Data show that the inmates use poor techniques to make tattoos; they practically mutilate themselves, while free people can express, in their bodies, the most varied techniques of manifestation body. However, the underlying concept among all kinds of tattooists is that their bodies are no screens for the tattoos (body-object); but the idea that these drawings are intrinsic to the body (they are part of them) as Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests. This study analyzed body designs from the perspective of visual perception, memory, design and registration, understanding the use of tattoos as language recorded graphically, and whose codes become elements of individual or group identity, configured as a form of language survival in the pursuit of social inclusion.