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Vietnam’s MTV generation change image of tattoos

Tattoos, once reviled in Vietnam as the preserve of prisoners, gangsters and common foot soldiers, are becoming increasingly popular among the country’s emerging ‘MTV generation’. In step with the international trend for tattoos as promoted by the likes of David Beckham and Angelina Jolie, increasing numbers of urban Vietnamese twenty-year olds are using permanent body art to express themselves.

Young women with swirly designs on their lower backs and men with barbed wire designs or other patterns round their biceps or shoulders have become a familiar sight in Ho Chi Minh City’s nightclubs and bars.

And the yet the concept of tattoos as a form of artistic expression is new to Vietnam, a country where tattoo parlours are illegal and where permanent body art is usually taken as a sign of criminal connections.

But Linh, a stunning 22-year-old with long painted fingernails, wavy brown hair and large sunglasses, says times are changing. “We think of tattoos as an art form now. They are beautiful, and that’s why I got my tattoo,” she says, referring to the 20-centimetre wide swirly design on her lower back.

Linh and three friends marked themselves out as unapologetic members of Vietnam’s new, and often highly privileged leisure generation, when they hired a tattoo artist to decorate their lower backs in a hotel room two years ago. Her mother did not share Linh’s taste in artistic expression and took a broom to her daughter after discovering the tattoo.

Vietnamese gangs have become an established phenomenon in the United States since the fall of Saigon in 1975, with the gang members and prisoners often tattooing themselves.

The initials ‘NCA’ are also popular among Vietnamese-American gang members, the letters standing for ‘Ninja Clan Assassin’. Giang, a small, hard-faced and plainly dressed 32-year-old from near Haiphong, makes her living by tattooing, either in her incognito parlour or at clients’ homes.

Giang does most of her tattoos at clients’ homes because most Vietnamese don’t want to be seen going in or out of a tattoo parlour, even one which is not marked as such.

But one form of tattooing enjoys legitimacy in Vietnam. Tattooed eyebrows are a popular method of corrective surgery in Vietnam, and women seeking the perfect arch can check into hospitals as well as self-trained beauty specialists to have the operation done. —AFP

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