Tattoo culture is getting mainstream in the West, but how about China?

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Tattoos are gradually becoming accepted by the mainstream culture in the West, as it tours through major conventions celebrating such culture.

Reuters reports, the London Tattoo Convention, which runs from Friday to Sunday in London, the UK, attracted over 400 artists from around the world and is expected to see 20,000 visitors.

The organizer of the convention, Marcus Berriman told the Reuters that “there’s been a total global shift in attitude.”

“Once upon a time, people associated it with criminals and bikers and punks, but now it’s mainstream really,” he added.

A tattoo artist prepares a design on the head of a man at the London Tattoo Convention in London, the UK on Saturday./Reuters Photo

Many surveys show that the number of people getting inked continued to rise over the past few years in different places, including the UK, the US and Australia.

As The Guardian reported in 2010, a fifth of all British adults was inked. The figure rises to 29 percent among all British among 16 to 44 years old.

In Australia, roughly one in seven Australians adults reported having been tattooed, according to a study in 2012 titled “Who gets Tattoos? Demographic and behavioral correlates of ever being tattooed in a representative sample of men and women” conducted by Elsevier, an analytic Company.

Due to this trend, it is much more common to see people with a tattoo as their body art in the West.

Yet it seems it is not exactly the case in China, although the tattoo culture is also getting more recognition here compared to years ago.

How do Chinese people see tattoo culture?

It is no surprise that many Chinese, especially the older generation, consider it hard to accept.

Tattoos are linked with “bad guys” in some people’s eyes due to historical reasons.

Tattoos were used as a punishment for prisoners in ancient China.

A file photo illustrates a prisoner got tattoo on his face as a punishment./Photo via Baidu Baike

Those who committed crimes would get mo xing, or ink punishment, which means they would get certain words or patterns, tattooed on their faces.

In many cases, the word written would be “prisoner”. It was a way to punish criminals as they would be greatly humiliated.

That punishment could be traced back to the Zhou Dynasty (1100-221 B.C.) and continued to be practiced over the next dynasties, including the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties.

Although it is no longer being used on prisoners, tattoos are yet to be promoted in a positive way.

Some people still believe that those who have large-scale tattoos on their bodies are normally gangsters in hit movies and TV shows in the past decades, which definitely contributed to the historical belief that people linking tattoos with “bad guys”.

However, tattoo culture was once prevalent among common people in ancient China, especially in the Tang Dynasty, which was shown in ancient paintings.

An ancient painting depicts a tattoo shop in the Tang Dynasty./Photo via sohu.com

It is not confirmed how this tattoo culture disappeared in China, but some believe it links to the historical changes and prevalence of conservative values.

Nowadays, tattoo culture is also growing in China.

Although not everyone from older generation could accept, young generations are more open-minded.

“I tattooed ‘Peking’ over my eyebrow because I love my city. People always think I’m Japanese or Korean but they never say I’m Chinese when I travel abroad. I hope they know that there are people in Beijing [who] also love tattoos,” Jia Kun, a 29-year-old tattoo enthusiast told Vice China.

Tattoo enthusiast Jia Kun who has "Peking" tattoo over his eyebrow./Photo via the official WeChat account of Vice China

He confessed he had concerns before getting tattoos, as well as support from his parents. Yet the huge passion for the art gradually drove him to get tattoos all over his body.

However, as he got more tattoos and working as a practitioner in this industry, his parents also understand much more about this culture and finally gave their support.

“Tattoos indeed attracted lots of stares and a different attitude, I can’t remember how many times I explained,” Jia said.

“Luckily, many people nowadays don’t look at tattoos the same way they did, Beijing becomes much more inclusive towards it.”

(Cover photo: Visitors to the London Tattoo Convention show off their body tattoos, Saturday./Reuters Photo)