Vietnamese women find healing with tattoos

HANOI: In her tiny Hanoi apartment, tattoo artist Ngoc inks middle-aged women whose lives have been upended by divorce or illness, each of them searching for healing through an art form that is still largely taboo in Vietnam.

Although attitudes are changing, tattoos remain associated with gangsters, prostitution and the criminal underground in the communist, broadly conservative country.

“I met many women who told me they loved tattoos but they were born at a time when no-one supported them,” Ngoc, who goes by the name “Ngoc Like”, told AFP.

But some are choosing to push back against those old ideas, seeing body art as emancipation…