Face tattoos were first in Japan

Archaeologist believe that the first settlers in Japan, the Ainu people, were tattooed in the face. In Japanese sepulchres, Haniwai has been found, small clay figures with face tattoos, presumably aimed for social rank and to keep evil spirits away. Later face tattoos were used to punish criminals.

Basic forms of body scratching are found in all indigenous cultures. Brands, which expresses a symbolic link between the individual and the cultural community and, therefore, often involving the name. Maybe the names, as Karl Young says in his essay on tagging, played an important role in the development of the language. "Tattoos was probably one of the earliest forms of visual poetry and the body the original basis for the book."

The girl from CherryVegas Flickr series Tokyo Streets is a living graffiti wall. Her face is painted with the old Japanese text, linked to her family and their names. A female counterpart to the Chinese bodyartperfomer Zhang Huans script ritual. The whole face is complete aesthetic composed: it all at once blurred and distinct calligraphy works with the graphics, asymmetric hair, the artificial, crooked placed eyebrows and the ink around the mouth. It shows the tension between the blurred and the permanent, between volatility and a sense of belonging to the Japanese tradition.

Many writers have used the tattoo as a metaphor for the relationship between something that at the same time is permanent and blurred. This duality is the landscape of graffiti artists.