Blood Lines – Indigenous Tattoo Symposium

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About Bloodlines

For the last few years, artists across Turtle Island have been involving themselves with Traditional Indigenous tattooing as a way to contribute to the revival of traditional tattooing practices. Tattoo practitioners are using ancestral mark-making techniques, ancestral symbolism and creating new iconography to connect Indigenous peoples to their familial knowledges, as dynamic and living cultures.

With an understanding of traditional tattooing practices as informative to Indigenous futurisms, artists have sought knowledge through various modes of learning. This includes exploration of ancestral tattooing histories and colonial records while working between the lines of unrecorded or erased histories. Traditional tattooing can repeal the effects of imperialism and assimilation in our communities to promote personal agency and new ways of being through evolving Indigenous cultural practices and visual arts.

Blood Lines is focused on the acknowledgement and knowledge sharing of traditional Indigenous tattooing practices. As a part of this event, we have gathered together artists who are community centred in the revival of traditional tattooing through an informed understanding of the importance that the practice has had and continues to have on Indigenous bodies. The influence of traditional tattooing will further the teaching and passing down of knowledge in symbolism, ritual, ceremony, and technique amongst other Indigenous peoples.

We invite the public to take part in the revival by attending the panel discussions, observing traditional tattooing methods during the live tattoo flash day, and poster sale. Celebrate the resurgence of Indigenous tattooing practices with us, and get inspired!

The artists to be included in this year’s Blood Lines event are as follows:

Blood Lines Artists:

• Holly Aubichon
• Jayda Delorme
• Geanna Dunbar
• Stacey Fayant
• Dion Kaszas
• Mel Lefebvre
• Nolan Malbeuf
• Sheri Osden Nault

Learn more about the artists.