Sun, Jan 24, 2016 page14

• Death reigns in Rio tattoo show

  • By Sebastian Smith / AFP, RIO DE JANEIRO
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  In their quest for beauty, Brazilian tattoo fans are turning to the most unlikely of pretty faces: the death skull.

  At Rio Tattoo Week 2016, billed as Latin America’s biggest piercing and tattoo convention, the image of death stared from arms, legs, necks and most other body parts, not to mention T-shirts and posters.

  Plenty of other designs featured at the three-day bash.

  

  A woman shows a skull tattooed on her calf at the Rio Tattoo Week in Rio de Janeiro on Friday.

  Photo: AFP

  Disney cartoon characters, Viking warriors, Japanese geishas, roses, vines and entire gardens were on show at the Rio convention center. Even old-fashioned Popeye anchors.

  However, inky death in various guises — grinning, grimacing, winking — was inescapable.

  “It has become the fashion,” said Priscila Virla, the 32-year-old co-owner of Lady Luck, a tattoo studio that caters especially to women and which had one of the 250 convention stands. “The skull is one of those things that has really caught on, especially here in Rio de Janeiro.”

  Some of the depictions of death carried in tattoo catalogues showed skulls horribly disfigured, screaming or dripping in blood.

  WHOLESOME ROOTS

  However, despite initial appearances, this attachment to skull images has surprisingly wholesome roots.

  “For Brazilians the skull represents equality,” said Binho Fernandes, whose Thug Nine clothing and accessories line is big on all things skull-related. “People tattoo skulls because the skull unites us all.”

  Nelio Cadar, whose Radac studio uses a highly stylized skull as its logo and who also sports a big skull tattoo on his right arm, agreed.

  “We take the beautiful side of the symbol. It’s less about death than equality,” he said. “Whether you have a lot of money or no money, whether you are Catholic or some other religion — when we all die we all have a skull.”

  The skull obsession originates from Mexico’s cultish Day of the Dead celebrations, tattoo experts at the convention said.

  There, the Aztec god of death was transformed by popular culture into a dark folk saint called Santa Muerte favored today by “criminals and the police,” said Federico Ruiz, an artist who had come to Rio from Mexico City to sell his works.

  SKELETON WOMAN

  Artistically related to Santa Muerte is another Mexican skeleton woman, Catrina, now a major inspiration for tattoo aficionados internationally, although with an especially lively following in Brazil.

  “It’s something Brazil took as its own,” Cadar said. “We’ve made it cool.”

  A detailed skull tattoo covering a good portion of the arm costs about 1,200 reais (US$293), a hefty sum in recession-hit Brazil. However, there is no shortage of clients.

  The appetite for tattoos is so great in Rio that vendors quizzed by Agence France-Presse seemed to agree that they remain protected for now against the nation’s economic crisis.

  The potentially gloomy aspect of being emblazoned with a death symbol does not deter much either.

  “Once you have a certain amount of tattoos, you stop caring so much about what they mean,” said Lorena Lima, 21, who bore a large Catrina tattoo —this one with fierce eyes and a stitched-up mouth — on her right arm.

  “You just have them because they’re beautiful,” she said, wincing as an artist worked on tattoo number 10, a woman with a serpent’s tongue.

  Anyway, skulls do not even have to be scary, Virla said.

  “See?” she said, pulling up a trouser leg to reveal a small skull with a playful red and white polka-dot hair bow. “It all depends on your perspective.”
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