Veterans have long sought to make sense of and capture their wartime experiences through a variety of aesthetic means such as novels, memoirs, films, poetry and art. Increasingly, scholars of IR are turning to these sources as a means to study war experience. In this article we analyze one such sense-making practice that has, despite its long association with war, largely gone unnoticed: military tattoos. We argue that military tattoos and the experiences they capture can offer a novel entry point into understanding how wars are made sense of and captured on the body. Focusing on a web archive – ‘War Ink’ – curated and collected for and by US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, we analyze how tattoos perform an important ‘sense-making’ function for participating veterans. We focus on three recurring themes – loss and grief, guilt and anger, and transformation and hope – demonstrating how military tattoos offer important insights into how military and wartime experience is traced and narrated on and through the body. The web archive, however, not only enables a space for veterans to make sense of their war experience through their tattoos, the archive also does important political work in curating the broader meaning of war to the wider public.

中文翻译：

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战争墨水：通过军事纹身进行感官和策划战争

长期以来，退伍军人一直试图通过各种美学手段（例如小说，回忆录，电影，诗歌和艺术）来理解和捕捉他们在战时的经历。越来越多的IR学者转向这些资源来研究战争经验。在本文中，我们分析了一种这样的感官实践，尽管它与战争有着长期的联系，但在很大程度上并未引起人们的注意：军事纹身。我们认为，军事纹身及其捕捉到的经验可以为理解战争如何在身体上产生和捕捉提供一个新颖的切入点。重点关注为伊拉克和阿富汗的美国退伍军人策划和收集的网络档案-“战争墨水”，我们分析了纹身如何为参与活动的退伍军人发挥重要的“造词”功能。我们专注于三个反复出现的主题-失落与悲伤，内与愤怒，以及变革与希望–展示军事纹身如何提供重要的见解，以了解如何在身体上以及通过身体追溯和叙述军事和战时经验。但是，网络档案馆不仅为退伍军人提供了一个通过纹身来了解他们的战争经历的空间，而且还在为广大民众宣传战争的更广泛意义方面进行了重要的政治工作。