Mix With All Classes Hi, My name is Emily and I like to look at and make art.

“No interviewee gave ethnic or clan identity as the reason for her tattoos, and no two women from the same ethnic group or clan had identical sets of scars. Nor did they portray tinhlanga as aimed primarily at transforming girls into sexually desirable wives. While many women laughingly confided that tattoos “make your husband happy” because when a man strokes a woman’s scarred body he instantly “wakes up” (that is, achieves erection), interviewees clearly linked heightened male excitement with their own sexual satisfaction: tinhlanga not only induced a man to spend more time caressing his wife during foreplay, but they also helped to ensure that he “woke up” (when his penis “rested” against her abdomen or thighs) for a second round of intercourse. Perhaps more telling, many women had their first tattoos cut long before puberty, and some went on accumulating them through adulthood even after a failed marriage had convinced them to live without men.”