For more than two years, Chinese tattoo artist Song Jiayin has been interviewing female clients and posting the results online, recording the memories, hopes and fears of hundreds of women in ink and video.
Their designs – from sunsets to suns to well-designed wombs and images of beloved animals – are as diverse as women’s motivations to carve them on their bodies.
In a country where the space for female self-expression has shrunk in recent years, getting a tattoo can feel like an act of empowerment.
“When you choose a tattoo, and choose a different image to put on your body, you are actually taking action to say, I am in control of myself,” Song told AFP.
The Chinese Communist Party has long controlled women’s bodies through coercive reproductive laws, such as the now-abandoned one-child policy.
Under President Xi Jinping, the authorities have destroyed almost all kinds feminist activism, restricting NGOs, arresting high-profile figures and suspending social media accounts.
The conservative attitude of valuing women primarily for their appearance and bearing children remains the norm, reinforced by state media and popular culture.
Song, who describes herself as a feminist, sees her project as an open-ended documentary that she hopes will help promote women’s voices and challenge stereotypes.
“I want to give (women) a bigger platform for more people to see what they have to say,” she said.
The “1,000 Girls” videos all stick to a simple format – starting with an icebreaker: “What’s your zodiac sign?”
But in the conversation that follows, the interviewee shares intimate thoughts about mental health, gender, anxieties about aging, and the death of a loved one.
– ‘The worst form’ of sexism –
In a studio filled with Song’s books last month, 27-year-old Liao Jingyi was happy to be part of the project – and to receive her first tattoo.
Lying on the tattoo table with her jeans rolled up on one side, Liao braced herself as the needle moved through the skin, and the outline of crashing waves and boulders gradually took shape on her calf.
He said he was inspired by a professor he saw at university, who told him he was like “a stone whose edge has not been broken”.
While tattoos are not common in the more cosmopolitan and affluent parts of China, women in particular still face scrutiny over their appearance.
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Taking ink, or not conforming to the traditional style, is frowned upon in conservative circles.
The recent suicide of a young woman who was the target of misogynistic online abuse after posting a photo of herself with pink hair highlights the intense pressure women can face.
“When women do not conform, they will be attacked and their morality will be questioned… It is sexism, rooted in gender inequality, in its worst form,” writer and social commentator Lijia Zhang told AFP.
– Disagree with tattoos-
One client, a woman in her 30s who chose a tattoo with a rainbow motif, said she had wanted to get inked as a young woman but her boyfriend had threatened to break up with her.
Another woman, a doctor who requested a design based on her grandmother’s purple hydrangea, said that at the hospital many patients felt that the tattoo doctor “seemed irresponsible”.
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Song said she was especially moved by a woman in her 40s who came in for her first tattoo.
Song remembers a woman asking: “I’m a mother, a wife, now I can be me and get any tattoo I want?”
– The chain breaks –
One of Song’s own tattoos near his elbow is particularly striking.
It depicts a broken chain as a tribute to Xiaohuamei, a woman who was found trapped in a shack in rural China with a chain and padlock around her neck last year.
Thought to be a victim of human trafficking, news of her plight sent shockwaves across the country.
Some clients ask for the same tattoo.
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“I think that any woman who sees this, including being forced to have eight children, will be very hurt,” Song said.
“I think we’ve been fighting for a long time. The fight for women to get this right has been going on for a long time.