Event Details

Every Tuesday 9.30 – 10.30am, we invite a Lancaster academic to brief us on their research. The format is a 20 minute talk followed by discussion.

Marking motherhood on the body: the tattoos of mothers who live apart from their children

Dr Lisa Morriss, Sociology Department

We will present initial findings from a pilot project funded by the Sociological Review. We used a narrative approach alongside arts-based visual methodologies to explore the inscription of tattoos with 8 mothers who live apart from their children. Highly stigmatised and often silenced through the scrutiny of state intervention and personal shame, these mothers carry images and the names of their children on their body in the form of tattoos. Tattoos can be used as a form of indelible memorialisation: inscribing ‘profoundly painful and intimate memories directly onto the flesh’ (Caplan, 2010, p.138). For these mothers, this is a unique form of loss and trauma as their children are alive, but many mothers are not allowed to know where their children are living. The children are a ‘ghostly presence’; there and not there at the same time (Gordon, 2008). The loss is especially difficult during the pandemic when the mothers are desperate to know that their child is well. The tattoo is a way of embodying motherhood; keeping your child(ren) with you - etched in your skin - until reunification. Thus, the tattoos mark past separation, present connection, and hope for future reunification with their child. The intimacy of tattooing your child(ren) on your body can be seen as a way of challenging the silencing that stigma brings; and enabling the telling of alternative stories. .