Braille Tattoo
By JOHN GLASSIE

In April, while taking a university course on “body technology,” a Czech art student named Klara Jirkova had a vision of a “touchable ‘tattoo’ for blind people.” According to her project paper, one way to do it would be to emboss the surface of your arm, say, with a word or message in Braille by having stainless-steel beads surgically implanted under your skin — thereby creating a body modification meant not just to decorate “but to be touched and read.”
Jirkova, who is 24, says “this was really meant to be used by blind people” and “not something that was supposed to become trendy.” Nevertheless, her proposal sent the trend-spotting sectors of the blogosphere into a tizzy after it went up on the school’s Web site in August. Hundreds of blogs posted a Photoshopped image that Jirkova made of a Braille tattoo on a girl’s arm, noting that the digitally created protrusions of flesh spelled “sun.”

It’s not clear, however, whether anybody has actually gotten a Braille implant. Jirkova says she probably won’t get one herself (she has no tattoos) but has three friends who want one. “Implants are a little problematic in the Czech Republic,” she says. “It must be a doctor who does it, and it’s not so easy to find one who is interested.” In the United States, subdermal implants — small subcutaneous horns on the forehead, for instance — have become more popular as a mode of body modification in recent years, but are still fairly rare.

Among the blind, there is disagreement about the satisfaction a Braille tattoo might provide. One visually-impaired blogger who goes by Etana wrote that the idea was “not only sensical but sensual in my book.” But others point out that only about 10 percent of visually-impaired people read Braille. “At the level of universal design utopianism, it’s fraught with problems,” says Stephen Kuusisto, the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening,” who has been blind since birth. “Having said that, I agree that we should all have the right to touch each other and read a message.

tips to Doug Ott
Is there a braille sign that says “Do Not Touch” ?

print