Article © 2008 PJ Reece

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"The current trend," says photog Justice Howard, "is to get tattoo replicas of works by erotic artists like Armanda Huerta, and Olivia whose style takes after another Playboy artist, Alberto Vargas. Howard has had the honor of her own photographic work copied as a tattoo. One of her ardent fans even requested permission to have her own portrait tattooed on his butt cheek. "Apparently, there was nowhere else on his heavily tattooed body to put it," muses Howard.

This would be the time to deploy the cliché, 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,' especially when the object of admiration lies below the pantyline where few eyes will ever get to judge. The 'face on derriere' brings into question, yet again, the question of what's really erotic, and if it isn't entirely subjective. New York City photographer, Brian Moss, believes that most people under-estimate how complicated 'erotic' actually is.

"Eroticism in tattoo art looks deceptively simple," says Moss, "but it's actually complex. Back away a minute and take another look at what's 'sexy' and what's 'erotic' -- they're actually two different things."

In addition to being a top fitness photographer, Brian Moss once owned one of the largest and most popular gyms in Manhattan. He points out that 'sexy' has little meaning anymore. Sexy shoes, sexy song, haircut, voice, tattoo, whatever -- what does it mean?

"In tattoos, as with many things, cliché is the enemy of eroticism," Moss says.

He's right, of course. Clichés are copies of copies of copies, just like all that flash hanging on the wall of the tattoo parlour, all quite safe and familiar. Sexy, maybe. "But erotic is a much more loaded concept. You can't bandy it about so easily. You have to make a conscious decision to use it."

By launching the 'c' word into the argument, Brian Moss elevates the discussion to new levels. We can toss 'sexy' around without signifying anything special, whereas 'erotic' makes us sit up and take notice. Erotic wakes a person up because it stirs the organism. It's a dynamic, and quite dictatorial, dispatching chemical shipments from the hormone factory in the brain, waking us up to the potential for a sexual encounter, even if it's with ourselves. For Brian Moss, erotica in tattoo art is far from guaranteed.

"I'm not sure that an erotic tattoo can exist in a vacuum," Moss says. "Part of a tattoo's importance is that it isn't important in itself. On paper, a tattoo design might be erotic, or it might not. But add a human -- the context -- and it becomes a delightfully complex question." It's the sexual energy emanating from the person that's responsible for making the tattoo 'erotic', according to Moss.

Photo by Brian Moss

As a professional photographer, it's Brian's business to apply photographic techniques to create the all-important context when shooting a tattooed person. "But now we're talking about an 'erotic photo'."

Photo by Brian Moss

When asked to select his most successful erotic tattoo photo, Moss chooses his 'slut' photo. "It's very blunt," says Moss, "the crumpled bed sheets, the dirty feet, the pose with the ass crack, the word 'slut'. It's the context that makes it hot. Or, perhaps we're just projecting our own shit onto it," says Moss.

LA photog, Eric Kroll, discovered that tattoos can work against a photo if the model isn't first and foremost delivering the erotic message. When Kroll met 'Rachel', who works at Needle Pushers Tattoo and Body Piercing in Van Nuys, California, he knew from her smile that she'd make a great model.

"This photo is sexy because Rachel is sexy," Kroll says. "The tats add to her beauty. They don't make her beauty, they add to it."

Photo by Eric Kroll - Check his blog here

"This was shot in my living room, just after she'd dripped wax on her body. She did it for my camera, for my visual pleasure."

According to German photographer, Rolf Hapke, most eroticism is explained by male voyeurism. "We respond to visual lures," says Hapke. "(And so) the location of the tattoo determines its sensuality." Hapke offers us this deceptively simple but unquestionably erotic shot of 'rose on a girl's bum'.

Photo by Rolf W. Hapke

"The rose is the flower of love," says Hapke, for whom the discreet placement accounts for everything. His little rose, for example, strikes him as far sexier than a huge ornament on a woman's lower back. "In Germany, we call them 'ass antlers'."

Tramp stamps, California license plates, 'ass antlers' -- it would seem as if the lower back tattoo -- once so sexy -- has become a cliché, if not the butt of a joke.

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