The old-timers among us may remember when only sailors and ex-cons had tattoos. If someone who wasn't an old sea dog or hadn't done time in the slammer was sporting a tattoo, it didn't bode well: at the very least, you'd cross to the other side of the street. But everything has changed now. Your aunt Paca has got herself a tribal and the odd government minister shows off tattoos in more or less unmentionable places. The tattoo has become so democratic that innovating with skin art has got harder and harder.
Since we assume nobody in their right mind is still planning to get a star on their elbow or their name in Japanese ideograms behind their ear, we thought that one way of finding new ideas might be to take art with a capital A to the skin. We're talking about artworks that hang in museums and are already making their way onto feet, hands, arms and other slightly more ticklish parts of the body.
We begin our tour of the skin with a hand that would have moved Edvard Munch to tears. Inspired by the Norwegian expressionist's female faces, this tattoo in black deserves a place of honour on our list. But if your thing is something a little less transcendent, or you simply prefer a face with its eyes open, let's move on to this colourful foot showing one of the faces of the famous pop painter Roy Lichtenstein.
We stay in the United States but go back a few years in time to savour one of the most original and daring tattoos on this list. Some people are bound to mistake it for a murder scene, but no: this tattoo is inspired by Jackson Pollock's dripping, combining blacks and reds that run all the way up this man's arm.
And where there's a Pollock there has to be a Rothko. The metaphysical flip side of dripping are the colour fields of American abstract expressionism, which did so much to shift the centre of the world's avant-garde art from Paris to New York.
With all that more or less dense abstraction, we've come over with an urge to get back to figuration. And in this selection of artistic tattoos we can't leave out one of the most sought-after artworks among fans of skin art: El beso by Gustav Klimt. Along with Van Gogh's La noche estrellada, it's one of the paintings most often requested in tattoo studios.
And we didn't want to forget another classic either: La gran ola de Kanagawa, one of the most famous illustrations in the history of art, which also decorates the skin of two or three people on the planet.
But for sheer originality, nothing beats this last tattoo on our list. Would you get a urinal tattooed on you? Maybe if it's signed by R. Mutt, alias Duchamp… One of the most famous sculptures of the 20th century can also make a good tattoo, right? Even if your aunt Paca, the one with the tribal, finds this too much already…
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