atlas(t)

map tattoos, part ii

Image above found here.

i clearly haven't been paying much attention.

In my my map tattoos post from April of 2006, I wrote that "Putting the map onto you, far from removing your control of its contents, actually intensifies your control of the map's contents by personalizing them, making them not just a part of your claim of identity, but an actual part of your body." Then I asked, if that was the case then why weren't there more map tattoos out there.

The answer is: there are.

First of all, the tattoo post was hands down this blog's most popular post evarrr, featuring as it did a colored map of the world on a model's ass ... clearly not a tattoo, but meant to look like one. For a while the photo of the world map on the woman's ass was turning up on the second page of google image search. There was a point, when my blog went into remission, that I was getting a thousand hits a day just from people google-image-searching "tattoos."

I hadn't know people were so hungry for tattoo ideas. I'm glad--for the thousandth time--that I don't have one.

Since then, folks have been sending me pointers--both by email and in comments--to their own map tattoos and I haven't even been noticing all that much. But clearly it's time to update, and post some of these images. And maybe look again at the analysis.

So this one, to the left, is the first one I was sent, about a year ago, by email. Not to be mean, but I wouldn't have known it was a map if the emailer hadn't told me. She also didn't specify what the map was of, just that she planned to wrap another map around it.

I hope she's well on her way to finding the right map tattoo, and hope that some of the images below will give her inspiration.

This one is via Strange Maps. The woman depicted, Britta Oelschlaeger, is "a fan of [her hometown of] Hannover’s football team and ... completely crazy about maps.”

In comments, Desiree "got this cool map tattoo done by Jim at River of Ink in Appleton." It's on her back. Apparently, her lower back. It's more old school than the butt tattoos, but then those probably aren't real tattoos.

Nick Benson of ottergoose.net got this done on vacation in Hawai'i

I've now got the 8 primary islands of Hawaii on display for anyone who lifts of my sleeve**. The three islands I've been to are shaded red. Assuming that I'll be back to visit the remaining islands (and need to get more of the islands filled in), I asked the artist which shade of red he used. The answer? Monthly red. How classy... at least it's easy to remember.

Clearly whoever named that color has never seen anyone's "monthlies."

Yoni, who is apparently more of the lingam sort, has the whole world on his forearm.

So much for the commenters. My previously rather disappointing google search for "map tattoo" turned up a much richer store this time, including the new ass map tattoo at the top of this post (which also appears to be fake. And what is it with ass tattoos on women?). Other treasures:

From the URL at the top of the guy's back, this appears to be a fake put together by a site specifically created to mashup funky tattoo images. But I could be wrong. If you have the time/inclination to dig, please correct me in comments.

Google image search picked up this much cooler, but equally fake looking, underground map here. Also no info.

Nebraska's Creighton University has a website where they posted a spread of students with tattoos. The very cool, seemingly small one above is from

Kevin Miles,
Arts & Sciences senior

How many tattoos?
A solid map of the world on the upper inside of his right forearm.
A compass and sun with the words “Adventure” and “Explore”.
Why get tattoos?
Had both tattoos done while in Thailand with his roommate two years ago. He loves to travel and wants to join the Peace Corps when he graduates.
Do people know you have tattoos?
Most people do since they are in pretty visible spots

Apparently, Napoleon's Australia pirate map tattoo sort of shows the extent of our trip. Whatever that means. This is creepily Pillow Bookish, in its visual invitation to peel it off when the wearer is dead.

And here's a more patriotic map of Australia.

Alejandro uses the three dimensional nature of his body (there's a back and a side!) to depict the world, in shiny shininess. If the shape weren't so familiar, it might look like a medical photo of a skin disease. (see also Kevin Miles.)

Tatiana's political map of Brazil is sexier, I think, and not because she's wearing a bikini under it.

But I think the pièce de résistance is this article about Brangelina, which tells us that not only does Ange have "over a dozen tattoos, including the geographical co-ordinates for all four of her children" (begging one to ask: geographic coordinates for what? Where they were born? Where they were jacked adopted from? Where they are right this second, Mrs. Weasley-style?) but this tattoo, depicted to the left, on Brad's broadening flank, is supposedly a diagram of the levees of New Orleans. The article sez:

Brad's unusual back tattoo comprises groupings of horizontal black lines, with bizarre boxed shapings below.

The strangest combination appears to be inspired by a map of the levees in New Orleans, which was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when the systems failed.

More than 1,800 people died in the storm and during the rescue debacle which followed, mostly the poor, sick and disadvantaged. Costing around $81billion, it was also the costliest disaster in U.S. history.

Since Hurricane Katrina, Brad and Angelina have bought a home in the Louisiana city and the actor has been heavily involved in local building projects.

So, what about map tattoos and identity? Well, let's mention a few really obvious things first. Tattoos are by now pretty much universally accepted in the industrialized West, except in certain subcultures. So de rigueur are they, in fact, that the internet has helpfully provided us with multiple tattoo design sites and blogs (many of which provided the tattoo photos above) designed specifically to help people find tattoos they haven't already seen on everyone and their little brother.

Second: maps and mapping are really, really popular at the mo'. I'm not going to go into this right now. I'm planning a post on it later, when I've had the time to read some more of the books that have come out recently about mapping 'n' stuff. But it is; it's in the air, mapping. Third: in the past two years, Web 2.0 has gone from an industry catchphrase to an embarrassing anachronism, and everyone knows how to post pictures online now. So the above two obvious things might mean that we have a sudden spate of map tattoos, but it also might be that the people with map tattoos are just posting them now, where they weren't before.

And some of these, like the subway maps, which might be fake anyway, or the outline world maps, seem to have been chosen simply because they look cool ... or are cool, conceptually.

But then there are the travelers' tattoos, like the one of Hawai'i, or Australia, or the one of China in the original post, where the tattoo is a marker of the place one has been to. It's a way of claiming possession of the places you've been, a possession similar to Henry VIII's brother Arthur's boast the morning after his wedding night with Catherine of Aragon: "I've been to Spain." That's what the reddening of the Hawai'ian islands the traveler has been to reminds me of: hymen blood, not monthly. Interesting that the travelers' tattoos are all on men. The Hawai'i tattooed guy's girlfriend got a tattoo with a similar intent on the same trip ... of Hawai'ian flowers.

The student's blacked-in world map is explained by his wanting to travel and join the Peace Corps. In this case, the map is a promise made to himself, to possess the world through travel. There's an added element here, embodied in the Peace Corps ideal, of the pending "citizen of the world," or the nascent member of the "international community," that group of geographically and nationally unmoored "experts" whose job is to make one part of the world intelligible to the other, but not necessarily vice versa. (I won't go into it now, but having grown up on the fringes of the "international community," I have isshooz.)

So it's all the more interesting to analyze Brangelina's tattoos about their children. Brad apparently has a tattoo of a blessing to celebrate Maddox's existence: not the child's name, not his birthdate or symbolic words or numbers, but a Buddhist blessing in Sanskrit. Pitt saves the possessive tattooing of names and dates for Ange alone, with a tat of her birthdate in Khmer. The womb raider, on the other hand---already widely reviled for laying claim to countries and cultures by adopting their children---doubles this notion back on itself, by making geographical coordinates symbolize her children (rather than something more individual, like a name or a birthdate), and then laying claim to the whole---nations, cultures, geographical place, and children---by tattooing these coordinates on her body.

And the "New Orleans" tat seems to be a fairly benign identity tattoo, a symbol trailing behind the Jolie-Pitts' purchase of a NOLA house. If it's actually what the media says it is, it's a mild protest of a historical wrong; turning New Orleans and its levees into a metonym for the Katrina disaster, and associating Pitt with both the protest, and the amelioration efforts. It's not him taking over a location to associate himself with it, it's him taking over a metonym to mark himself a good guy.

There's more to say about all of this, but I'm tapped for now. Maybe I'll check in on map tattoos again.

austin kleon's maps of fictional worlds

austin Kleon has a nifty post about maps of fictional worlds ... primarily made by the authors themselves.

My undergrad thesis argued that world-building wasn’t just for fantasy and sci-fi writers—every tale has a setting, every tale creates a world in the reader’s mind—and it explored ways that drawing that world (visual thinking!) can lead to better fiction.

Some of my favorite “lit’ry” books are accompanied by maps.

I've talked before on this subject and have nothing new to say at this time, but check out the post for images and links to other maps, especially in Kleon's previous posts, and in the comments section.

Via Gwenda.

ice detention deaths

via Zuky, an interactive map showing 83 immigrant detainees whose deaths in detention might be due to neglect or abuse. Click here to engage with the interactive map and read the names.

thoughts on jane jacobs three: outdoor living rooms

since I read this NYT article (via Pruned) it has gone behind a firewall, but the upshot is that a new movement is seeing architects assisting communities in building low-cost "living room" furniture in public spaces, if for no other reason, to offer people a place to sit.

These tend to congregate around bus stops.

The idea began several years ago in Oakland, where community organizers and residents got together to improve places where neighbors tended to congregate — the corner store, outside the barbershop — amid a decidedly downtrodden environment.

“The idea was to enable low-income communities to create their own social spaces and improve their neighborhoods without bringing on gentrification,” said Steve Rasmussen Cancian, the landscape architect who helped introduce the living rooms.

With the help of residents, simple pieces of furniture were erected here and there around Oakland, giving bits of cheerful life to corners where there was little to look at. Mr. Rasmussen Cancian then imported the idea to Los Angeles, on a corner where drug dealers and prostitutes did business near a Y.M.C.A. used by families.

At the same time, Central City Neighborhood Partners, a nonprofit group that focuses on low-income families here, surveyed residents in the city’s center about their transportation needs. At the top of the list was a well-maintained place to wait for buses, which, according to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, are boarded citywide an average of 1.2 million times a week. Thus the marriage of community living rooms and bus stops.

One advantage of doing it this way is cutting through red tape, and another is the cost: “A simple pocket park takes a half-million dollars and takes two to three years to build, while a living room takes as little as a month and between $5,000 and $15,000.”

And WWJJD? She might say that this is an interesting experiment in creating community street surveillance. You give people a place to congregate and suddenly, there are people outside to people-watch. You give people a place to sit down, and suddenly, there's a place from which to people watch, in neighborhoods where there aren't many good vantage points to view the street.

I don't imagine that this one effort will solve all of L.A.'s--or Oakland's--problems, but in conversation with efforts to build more street-friendly residences and mixed-use zoning, this could be good.

It's not the same as park-building, but it's closer to effective park-building than street-building. Or maybe you could say it's half-way between the two: creating small spaces on streets that function somewhat like small parks and integrate into street diversity.

It's not surprising that this movement arose in Oakland. Oakland has a number of parks like the one above near my house, shoved into strange unbuilt little triangles of intersections. The one above is what Jacobs would call a successful transient park, a good gathering place for the homeless or jobless, but not pleasant for nearby residents, who never use it. This is because, as you can sort of tell from the photo, there are no buildings at all near it, much less mixed-use residences and shops.

Behind the viewer in this view is a Greyhound station, that bringer of blight; and the center of the park is not merely shaded, but obscured by trees, making any rational person want to avoid it. And further, the park is relatively large, making you feel like you have a distance to traverse to get through it. I always have to think whether I'd prefer to walk through or around it.

On the other hand, there's this one, a mere ten blocks away, near my friend's house:

I visited my friend last weekend during the hot weather, and this park seemed to be bristling with naked arms and legs. Mostly teens and young people, but also some older people were hanging out in tank tops and shorts, drawn together although there wasn't enough shade to cover all of them. The younger people, particularly the men, spilled out into the street to the left, hanging out there, and crossing back and forth frequently between the park and the convenience store that is just outside of our view on the left.

As you can see this park is tiny, just the triangle created by the intersection of two grid streets and a larger avenue that cuts diagonally across the grid. Mixed-use residences overlook the park on two sides: on the left, where your view is cut off, and before you to the left. On the right, across the big blvd (San Pablo) is a higher project which, though farther away, also can see farther and also overlooks the park.

I was late to a party but I really wanted to stop (at a "safe" distance, of course) and watch the goings on in the park because it was so interesting. It's the first such park I've seen in Oakland, although there are fairly frequent triangles in the streets, and many filled with parks.

They need both the mixed-use surroundings, the small, overseeable size, and, as pointed out above, furniture for people to sit on.

I love how my eyes are seeing things Jacobsly.

blog nirvana map

this is an old one from a year ago when I stopped blogging here completely. Jumping off an earlier post mapping the route to blog nirvana, this Valleywag blogger mapped out which blogs have gotten close, or reached it (boingboing). I'd comment, but it's pretty self-explanatory.

the vacationeers' "google maps"

Silly, but seriously, haven't you ever thought about it?

dark matter 3-D map

the above video is about a 3-D map created last year by an international team of scientists who, using photos taken by the Hubble thingy thing, mapped the dark matter we can see (or rather, not see) in a small square of space, by looking at the way the starlight bends around it.

Yeah, I never really understood how we could tell that the starlight bends. But the map is purty and cool.

schiaparelli and mars maps

annalee newitz recently contributed an awesome post to io9 comparing 19th century maps of Mars to current science, which she got from an even awesomer (if possible) post on BibliOdyssey. Annalee compares the historical maps to more recent satellite photos from the 1990's. Peacay of BibliOdyssey show a buncha Schiaparelli maps, and a Percival Lowell map, and talks about the (to me, now) well-known history of the canals and the Martians.

What impresses me about this Schiaparelli map (Schiaparelli was the eye-talian who called the structures above depicted "canali," which simply means "channels" in Italian but was misunderstood as "canals" in English, thereby setting off the intelligent-life-on-Mars craze) is how wacko-Max-Ernst-modernist-sci-fi-y they look. Is this the source of a particular aesthetic? Or as Peacay put it:

Schiaparelli's (in)famous 'canali' turned out to be a kind of optical illusion caused by interactions between light, dust clouds that form in the martian atmosphere, the orbital location and background interference from the planet's surface itself. If a sketch is made of something that wasn't really there but you believed it to be there at the time, can you call the result abstract art I wonder? I guess so.

geography tutor: map projections

i have no commentary, I just wanted to post this. Useful.

garmin vs. maposaurus

"you just can't beat a good old fashioned map sometimes." Indeed.