Sandi Fellman is best known for sensual photographs that juxtapose the rich texture of fabrics with portions of flesh. With this interest in exquisitely embroidered textiles, it is not surprising that she would also be interested in tattoos. She was aware that the Japanese had pushed this art to an extreme.
During a trip to Tokyo in 1982, she met the world-renowned tattoo artist Mitsuaki Ohwada at his studio. A client lay on his tatami-mat flooring. Ohwada pricked his flesh with various sized needles dipped in different colors—reds, blues, yellows and green. “I thought of Ohwada more like an artist brush-painting a landscape or an ikebana sensei carefully arranging flowers,” writes Fellman in her book, “The Japanese Tattoo.”
Restraint, Tokyo, Japan, 1983
“Within an hour the session was over. A square inch of a man’s body had been indelibly changed for life. Here was beauty created through brutal means. Power bestowed at the price of submission. Delicate elegance attained by way of violence,” she observes.
Traditionally, Japanese tattoos of the nineteenth and early twentieth century covered the body like a short coat, leaving the lower legs and feet, the neck and face, wrists and hands exposed. After World War II, experiments were done with full body tattoos, which leave only the feet and hands uncovered.
