Painted, written, etched into the skin, the tattoo tells the story of our fears and our desires. The history of each tattoo is related, though not always clearly, to the history of the body that carries it. A tattoo is forever, a mark of belonging, a decoration, a punishment or a promise, at times a way of differentiating one self and at times a demonstration of one’s belonging: from the sailor who crosses Tierra de Fuego for the first time to the prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, the prostitute, the young homosexual, the bikers or the scars left by rites of passage in an archaic civilisation. The tribes with their rituals and liturgies of blood, past and present, consecrate their members with drawings; stories that art has symbolized in a thousand ways through images on the skin, depictions, forms that are ephemeral on the physical body but that remain eternal on the skin of art.

The two key artists featured in EXIT #2 are Brazilian Miguel Rio Branco and Spanish Alberto Garcia-Alix. The former presents the tattoo as the trace of rituals and time, as a scar and mark on the body, whilst the latter approaches them as parallel stories on the bodies of peculiar individuals and members of today’s urban tribes. In addition to these two artists, the pages of this issue presents the works of Helena Almeida, Robert Doisneau, F.R. Burton, Jana Sterbak, Annette Messager, Rosângela Rennó, Wim Delvoye, Sandi Fellman, Adriana Varejâo, Xu Bing, Nobuyoshi Araki, Alfredo Jaar, Zhang Huan, Björn Göttlicher, Montserrat Santamaría, Andrés Pinal, Pierre Gonnord, Santiago Sierra, Daniele Buetti, Teo Sabando, Paul Blanca, Fernando Illana, Bernhard Prinz, Kurt Markus and Peter Greenaway, amongst others.

The texts that accompany and deepen the visual reading of the images are written by Rosa Olivares, with an introductory article about tattoos within the history of art. The central piece is dedicated to the two artists previously mentioned. With regards to Alberto García-Alix, a critical text by Carlos Jiménez, The Tattoo and its Legends and an interview carried out by Gonzalo García Pino The Direct Eye, the Eye of the Fighter. In the pages dedicated to Miguel Rio Branco, there is a piece by Paulo Sergio Duarte, Inverting the Pyramid (The skin of time) and an interview by Adolfo Montejo entitled The Dark Skill of Miguel Rio Branco. EXIT #2 closes it chapter of texts with an article written by Alberto García-Alix himself about the history of the tattoo through the centuries. At the end the usual index of artists is listed with the biographical details and curriculum of the artists featured in this issue of EXIT.