​Seen Through Tattoo

This project grew from a childhood incident in which I was excluded from a school video for wearing a temporary tattoo, which,an early awareness of how tattoos are misread in my culture. I invited over 500 participants on REDnote to photograph and interpret their own tattoos, returning visual authorship to their bodies instead of photographing them myself. The images were curated into a 1:1 visual archive that preserves each person’s style while creating a non-hierarchical structure. Here, tattoos become traces of memory and choice rather than symbols of deviance, redistributing visual power and resisting dominant narratives by letting people tell their own stories through their skin.