The Butterfly with a Thousand Tattoos
The Butterfly with a Thousand Tattoos is a documentary portraiture project about butterfly tattoos whose title is inspired by the work of Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” Joseph Campbell was a mythologist who posed that certain myths and symbols were archetypal and fundamental to human psychology. Although certain details might differ slightly, humanity’s core beliefs and experiences, and how we express them, are remarkably similar.
The girls and women who work in the red-light areas of Thailand have extra-ordinary lives. They are part of a systemic flow from the rural areas of Isaan to the tourist areas along the coast. Their lives are both very unique and very familiar. They have experienced and seen things beyond the mundane, yet their hopes, dreams, pains, and joys are the same as anyone else’s. The butterfly tattoo is a way of exploring this.
This project documents the variety of butterfly tattoo designs and also the variety of these women’s experiences. Through interviews and a mix of location and studio photography, we will get a deeper look at their lives, their struggles, and their experiences.
Tattooing as an art form has a long history and a variety of applications. They can be religious, social, or expressive in nature. This project focuses on the expressive nature of the tattoo. We don’t choose our bodies; sometimes scars can’t be helped, but the tattoo is an intentional marking. It can be an act of defiance, a demonstration of humanity’s free will in the face of fate.
Of the many tattoo motifs among the women who work in the red-light areas of Thailand, the butterfly is a common one. What attracted it to me as a subject was its popularity as a an expressive symbol and the variety of meanings it had. For many of these women and girls, the butterfly is a symbol of freedom, a mark of remembrance, and sometimes it is just something pretty they want on their bodies. It can also symbolize sex, promiscuity, beauty, strength, love, or change. In Thailand, they call a person who has many romantic or sexual relationships a butterfly, fluttering from flower to flower.
Through interviews and conversations, I asked these women about their tattoos. Some answers were as expected, some were quite surprising. Often there was a thread of commonality.
It is my hope that, as a documentary project, The Butterfly with a Thousand Tattoos will both make the universal into the specific and the specific into the universal.