The skin of belonging

Abstract This article explores the construction of cultural identity and belonging through a case study of a young woman of Korean heritage, living in Australia, and her use of tattoos in claiming linguistic citizenship ( Stroud, 2001 , 2018 ; Stroud et al., 2020 ). The study uses the concept of skinscapes ( Peck & Stroud, 2015 ; Peck & Williams, 2019 ; Roux et al., 2019 ) to analyse how she disrupts state-level, top-down notions of citizenship through semiotic claims to belonging, exemplified in tattoos that draw upon imagery that align with fluid notions of heritage and origin. Skinscapes in this study are shown to be material-discursive objects that are at once transformative and transgressive, allowing the bearer to make choice and agency the defining characteristics of a transpositional cultural identity ( Li & Lee, 2024 ).