My Tattoo Helped Me Exert Bodily Autonomy, but Its History Is Misogynistic 

F–Hole by Max Keller

I pulled up my shirt and lay face-down on the table, my cheek sticking to the crinkly paper. Using a ruler, the artist drew lines across my just-shaven lower back. I imagined it in my mind’s eye, the way children guess words etched in fingernail, as a kind of butcher’s diagram. On top of this grid, he placed the stencils: Two sloping curves mirrored across the axis that is my spine. The machine buzzed. 

On May 14, 2022, Man Ray’s Le Violin D’Ingres sold for $12.4 million at Christie’s New York, thereby setting the record for the most expensive photograph sold at auction. The surrealist photograph shows Kiki de Montparnasse’s naked backside. She wears a turban and dangly earrings, the top of her butt-crack peeking out from a sarong. Following the contours of her waist are two large cursive “Fs.” These F-holes, as they’re called, weren’t drawn directly on Kiki’s skin. By way of F-shaped stencils, they were later burned into photosensitive paper using a “rayograph” technique, named for its inventor. The effect is a visual illusion: Kiki’s torso transforms into a violin or, more to scale, a cello. Her rounded shoulders, hourglass waist, and soft buttocks become the instrument’s curves. From the original negative, currently at the Pompidou Center, several Le Violon D’Ingres prints were made in 1924. These are housed at the Getty, Worcester Art Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, and now some undisclosed location.

On January 27, 2022—only four months prior to the Christie’s sale, coincidentally—I got two F-hole tattoos at Mooncusser Tattoo & Piercing Studio in Provincetown. They cost me $300. Before my appointment, I had sent the tattoo artist a jpeg of Le Violon D’Ingres as well as a technical diagram, estimating that each snaking shape, rendered in black ink, would measure about four-and-a-half inches on my lower back. It was ambitious for a first tattoo, especially as I’d only recently gotten my ears pierced—impulsively, at a Claire’s—in what had felt, absurdly, like a belated loss of virginity. Dizzy with nerves, I pulled up my shirt and laid face-down on the exam table, the room smelling of sweat and rubbing alcohol. The tattoo artist carefully placed the stencils on my lower back: Two sloping curves in mirror image. The tattoo gun buzzed.

Six months earlier I’d come out as trans. The piercings, now the F-holes, felt like my first brushes with bodily autonomy, the idea that I could turn this fleshy vessel into anything I wanted. Tattoos, though permanent, are often spontaneous at the onset, accruing more meaning later. And though I’d played the cello since childhood and liked Le Violon D’Ingres, my conscious reasoning for getting these tattoos didn’t go much deeper than that. I hadn’t yet considered, for example, the irony that at the same time that I was transitioning in the masculine direction, I was metamorphosing into a cello, an instrument modeled after the female body. This was a tension that I’d later need to resolve. 

Born Alice Prin, Kiki was Man Ray’s muse and lover. At least, that is how she’s portrayed in the Christie’s catalogue. But Kiki was also an artist in her own right. Highly influential in Paris’s avant-garde scene, she was a singer, actress, painter, and writer of salacious memoirs. Le Violon D’Ingres portrays Kiki less as a person than as an object of desire. The title is an homage to neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, who was an amateur violinist. In French, the phrase “violon d’Ingres” means a “hobby”—here, Kiki is reduced to one. Indeed, Le Violon D’Ingres is part of a long line of hetero-masculine art. The pose is borrowed from Ingres’s La Baigneuse de Valpinçon, whichwas, in turn, influenced by Raphael’s La Fornarina, a portrait of the model with whom Raphael allegedly died of excessive lovemaking. If you doubt it, compare the turbans. The lineage can be traced by a simple piece of clothing meant to evoke the harem, that Orientalist obsession. 

As the tattoo gun rose in pitch, I braced for pain. But what came instead was mild, not unpleasant, like someone scratching my back with overgrown fingernails. The tattoo artist had a scraggly beard and gauges. As he worked, he explained that the machine pokes a needle, or cluster of needles, into the skin, leaving ink in its place. If you think about it, every tattoo is made up of thousands of holes, probably more. Some people, he said, find the endorphins that tattoos release to be addicting. (I wondered at this point if he was flirting with me—and, if so, what gender he thought I was.) After an hour and a half, the artist was done. I looked at my reflection in the tattoo parlor mirror. My skin was pink and puffy, but there on my lower back were two F-holes, black and glistening. 

The F-holes in Le Violon D’Ingres aren’t actually accurate. This is why I sent the tattoo artist a diagram. The overly thick middle lines, which on a cello indicate the bridge’s placement, slant the wrong direction. A cello’s back measures between 27 and 30 inches, about the same as a person’s. (My own back, from nape to bottom, measures 28.) On a cello, F-holes are carved not into the back but into the belly, which is made of softer wood. Luthiers trace the shapes in pencil, then rough-hew them with the saw. Finally, they trim the F-holes with a knife. It’s delicate work with no room for error. But no two F-holes are perfectly symmetrical; most are fraternal twins. On older instruments, the wood around the F-holes can sag, creating a gaping opening. Shine a flashlight in it and you’ll see all the cello’s inner workings. The maker’s label, soundpost, years of repairs, even dust bunnies. 

As my F-holes healed, they began to itch. Though I wasn’t supposed to, sometimes I scratched them in my sleep. One night, I dreamed that I was being swarmed by insects. They burrowed into me, building sticky nests in the small of my back. Buzzing. When I woke up, my sheets were sprinkled with black bits of dead skin. They looked like ants. Once my F-holes stopped shedding, I propped my iPhone on a chair, set a timer, and sat shirtless on my bed. The first couple selfies were duds, as I struggled to sit up on the cushy surface. The third one was good enough, but I’d forgotten to turn my face towards the camera. In the original, Kiki’s profile is just visible: the flutter of an eyelash, the suggestion of parted lips. I also noticed that my back, dotted with moles, was a scrawnier shape, vertebrae jutting from childhood scoliosis. 

The earliest sound holes were round, like on a guitar. These became half-moons, then ones like Cs. The F-hole didn’t come until later. The shape, more than just decorative, was developed over centuries of trial and error. Only recently did a team of researchers at MIT determine why the F-hole is so acoustically efficient. The answer is revealed in a scientific paper too technical for my comprehension. Sound holes apparently help the cello vibrate through something called Helmholtz resonance, the same phenomenon behind blowing into a glass bottle. But no matter how often the physics are explained to me, they still feel wrong somehow. How could making holes in something improve the sound? Surely the music would leak out. I imagine it forming two shimmery, viscous puddles by my feet. It sticks to my shoes, making peculiar noises when I walk. 

A hole is an emptiness. Something to be filled. Front hole. Back hole. Ear. Mouth. Anus. Trypophobia is a fear of holes. The word comes from the Greek “trypta,” meaning hole. Trypanophobia on the other hand is a fear of needles. It comes from the Greek “trypano,” meaning borer or piercer. Something that makes holes. 

I first saw Chuck Samuels’s After Man Ray on a postcard in a Provincetown gift shop. The work, which some might consider soft porn,is part of the Canadian artist’s 1991 Before the Camera project, a series of self-portraits recreating classic photographs of women. After Man Ray isn’t altogether successful, but perhaps that’s the point. When Kiki’s torso is replaced with Samuel’s, it doesn’t quite work. His lean and muscular back, almost trapezoidal in shape, looks nothing like a cello. Instead, one is drawn to the shadowy crease between his buttocks. Under a homoerotic gaze, it feels somehow even more charged. A fuck hole. 

In music, the symbol f denotes forte. Its opposite, piano, is denoted p. Loud and soft. Strong and weak. Musician and instrument. Artist and muse. Man and woman. Photographer and subject. Tattooer and tattooed. Top and Bottom.

The term “tramp stamp” came out of the ’90s trend of low-rise jeans. These exposed lower back tattoos, directing the eye down below, became associated with promiscuity. Somehow, I didn’t put this together until after I got my tattoos. “I have F-hole tramp stamps,” I realized one day with horror. I also discovered that I was far from original. Among the celebrities to have F-hole tattoos is Julia Fox. I’ve even met two other people with F-hole tattoos, both on Riis Beach: One a lanky twink with shoulder-length hair, the other a stocky butch with an “I lesbians” hat. In our photos together, we look about as different as possible, except for, of course, the F-holes. 

“By far the most widespread appropriation of Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres takes place in the tattoo parlor, for many women” writes the Christie’s lot essay, momentarily forgetting the existence of people other than women, “have permanently affixed the F-holes of a violin onto their backs, paying homage to Man Ray’s ingenious visual pun.” Am I no more than a copy? Another one of Man Ray’s replicas? Sometimes I wonder if I would have gotten this tattoo if I’d known more about its misogynistic history. Does the fact it’s on my trans body constitute a sufficient reclaiming? I wonder if maybe I’ve made a mistake. But then I remember that when I bind my chest, it cuts off the very top of my F-holes. The beige fabric blends in with my skin and they no longer look like Fs. The illusion is ruined, and I love it.  

I took off my robe and sat on the white photography cube, my thighs and ass spilling over its edges. It was my first time posing nude for my friend Sara. We had started with some clothed shots playing the cello. (My back still hurt from hoisting my case over subway turnstiles.) Then we tried to reproduce Le Violon D’Ingres. The pose is surprisingly uncomfortable. To emulate the cello’s shape, you must raise your shoulders, arms crossed tightly in front of you, everything strapped in. You don’t see this in the static original, of course. So, Sara took some photos from the front. In them, my chest is covered, robe obscuring my crotch. I also suggest that Sara take some reclining photos from above. But she didn’t like the power dynamics of that, her on top of me. The camera, she said, can be penetrating. In the freezing-cold room (we’d forgotten to turn on the thermostat), Sara took some photos of me playing in the nude. I can feel the vibrations in my collarbone, where wood digs into flesh, leaving a bruise that stays with me for days. For a moment, I’m both musician and instrument, all at once. 

Sometimes, I think about how my tattoo’s appearance will change as I continue testosterone and get top surgery. I imagine my bare back against a dark backdrop. As if in a time lapse video, it starts to shift. With each click of Sara’s camera, my shoulders broaden. My muscles ripple. My hips shrink. My waist fills out. Hair climbs up my lower back. Only the F-holes remain the same, boring into the camera like two eyes.

When I saw Le Violon d’Ingres in Baltimore some months later, it was smaller than I expected, only about seven inches tall. I’d imagined it life-size. The print was hazy and sepia-toned, as if stained by cigarette smoke. As I looked at Kiki, I felt myself clenching my butt, tensing my shoulders, like mirroring a friend in conversation. I felt my F-holes prickle and wondered if they’d raised, as they sometimes do in the humidity. I looked to the security guard, who suspected nothing, and took a hand under my shirt. 

In another universe, I lie face down on the wooden table. The room smells sweet, like sawdust, as warm, dry air tickles my back. The machine purrs. I brace for pain but feel nothing, as if anesthetized, watching as beige curlicues fall by my sides. As an assistant hastily sweeps them up, I mutter my apologies, as if somehow responsible for the mess. Something bubbles up from the wound, like sap, which the luthier periodically wipes off with an old cloth. After many hours, he’s done. I’m supposed to keep the bandages on for at least a week, but I can’t wait that long. When I get home, I rip off the gauze, stained rust-red in the shape of Fs. In the mirror, I peer into my F-holes but can see nothing, only blackness. Gingerly, I stick a finger in.

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