While for some this victory may take as harmless a form as a star hidden below the waistband, among a certain segment of the "inked" population tattoos are the embodied equivalent of an epithet scrawled on an altar. Whatever the literal meaning of the symbol or image etched onto the skin, many tattoos have a subtext which is hard to miss: Fuck you, Mom, they might as well say, or, for the more ambitiously disaffected, Fuck you, world -- both of which are ways of saying the same to God, of writing it in big, clear letters so the old man won't mistake a kiss-off for a prayer.

Yet tattoos have always been both -- a negation of one way of thinking about the body, and an affirmation of another. Just as one people's religion is superstition or sin to the neighboring tribe, one man's vandalism is another man's tag.

The Bible's treatment of tattooing, understood in the loosest sense, reflects this ambiguity. "You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh on account of the dead or tattoo any marks upon you," Levitcus 19:28 says. The reason given, "for I am the Lord," is more than just a divine "Because I said so." Rather it is an indication that what was at issue for the tribes of Israel was not the act of marking but the meaning of a particular mark. Elsewhere, in fact, the Chosen People are commanded to mark themselves -- so long as the mark is a sign of the One God and no other.

"It shall be as a mark on your hand or frontlets between your eyes; for by strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt." -- Exodus 13:16

"This one will say, 'I am the Lord's,' and another will call himself by the name of Jacob, and another will write on his hand, 'The Lord's'..." -- Isaiah 44:5

Even Paul, for all his my-body-is-a-Temple talk, couldn't resist the power of tattoo imagery:

"Henceforth let no man trouble me; for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus." -- Galatians 6:17

It's not the medium, in other words, but the message.

At least that's the gospel preached by the Christian Tattoo Association. Scattered around the country, drawn together by their desire to make their bodies bilboards for salvation, the artists featured here don't doubt that the body is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. In fact, it is precisely for this reason that they think the bodies of the faithful should be set apart and identified as such -- just as Jewish homes were marked with the blood of the lamb on the night the Angel of Death visited Pharoah's Egypt.