Analysis of a collection of 'Skin Deep' magazine covers.

Skin Deep is a the UK's largest selling tattoo magazine, it was created in 1994. According to the data on it's website only 38% of it's readers are female. This, apparently, makes it okay for them to represent women in the way they do.

This is the January 2010 edition, it creates an idea of how women with tattoos are represented in this magazine. These women are often barely clothed or in extremely revealing clothes, this may be to target their male readers but to an extent it also alienates their female audience. This is common in tattoo magazines where women with tattoos are seen as sex objects rather than the works of art men with tattoos are made out to be. The stereotypically female tattoos on this woman are one of the focal points of the cover, they feature jewels and a 50's style drawing. Most of the covers used by this magazine have a 1950's 'feel' as the rockabilly style, in which women typically wear 1950's fashion such as doing their hair in a victory curl (Pictured here) and imitating style icons such as Bettie Page (Again pictured here) 

An article entitled 'Only Women Bleed' was featured in the September 2011 issue. The article was to highlight the difficulty of being a woman with tattoos, however, it began with them talking about a beauty contest although it is the first for tattooed women. Throughout the article women's tattoos were repeatedly called kawaii (A Japanese adjective meaning pretty or cute) which in my opinion is derogatory as this makes women's tattoos appear to have no meaning or thought behind them and as though they were done on a whim instead of planned for many years.

In conclusion, through my analysis of the Skin Deep magazine covers I have developed a basic idea of how women are represented in the media, as sex objects rather than taken seriously, and how they are sterotyped as mindless drones who are attracted to cute things rather than anything with an actual meaning behind it.