Introduction

In the biographical section of her website, the contemporary Celtic tattoo artist Pat Fish writes:

This intimate description expresses the artist’s devotion to seeking out inspirational patterns and motifs for her work. Her use of the term “pilgrimage” suggests an intensely spiritual journey, and has intriguing resonances for scholars of medievalism. It seems as if certain ancient designs call out to her from Neolithic monuments and early Christian crosses like the relics of centuries-old martyrs. Instead of offering salvation or healing, however, the pictures beg to be replicated in the medium of modern body art. For medievalists, the trope of relics resurfaces when Fish chooses to describe her artistic process using the word “translation”. Like the bodies of Christian saints, her Celtic designs emerge from a distant past, become encased in the jewels of medieval culture, and arrive in the twenty-first century coated with glorious patinas of antiquity.

Fish’s elision of ancient, medieval, and modern imagery is typical of many contemporary tattoo artists, who are effectively creating Celtic bodies in the modern world. Their notion of a transcendent Celticism derives from a familiar moment for scholars of medievalism: the nineteenth century. In the context of literary and political movements of the period, the term Celtic began to circulate as a marker to differentiate Irish, Scottish, and Welsh culture from the Anglo-Saxon and European traditions. Such an eternal Celtic collective, standing in contrast to the mainstream, provides a perfect analog for the current practice of tattooing: both the term and the images are markers of simultaneous difference and belonging, and both encompass past, present, and future identities. From this perspective, Celtic culture lies outside the norms of the dominantly Anglo-Saxon Western tradition, and yet it beckons to those who long for a sense of communal identity.