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Placement · placement_knee

Knee

The knee joint. Tier 1 attested as a distinct placement in naval tattooing, and LATERALISED in the record: “If a pig was tattooed on the left knee and a rooster on the right foot” - which the source ties to a saying, “Pig on the knee, safety at sea.”
Thin
Low confidenceresearched

No links2 sources · T1

What the research says

placement_anatomy
Category
limb
Available area
“The smallest areas on the body are best for simple designs made of basic shapes.” The chart lists the knee in that band.
Joint behavior
A joint, and the second row in this batch where joint_behavior cannot be answered: NO FETCHED SOURCE DESCRIBES WHAT HAPPENS TO A DESIGN OVER THE KNEE. See placement_elbow; the gap is the same one.
Scale behavior
Small in the cited chart.

Provenance

2 resolved

  • Every tattoo makes a statement but what do they mean? (opens in a new tab)

    Tier 1

    The Historic Dockyard Chatham

    Maritime heritage museum article on naval tattoo designs. Verbatim: records show designs that are "marks of love, loss and life events" while others demonstrate "national identities, religious faith, and patriotic pride"; "Each swallow represents 5,000 nautical miles in a sailor's career." One of the few tier 1 sources that speaks about tattoo subject matter as lived human experience rather than as art history.

    museum · retrieved 2026-08-28

  • Tattoo Placement Chart (opens in a new tab)

    Tier 2

    Tattooing 101

    Professional tattoo-education page and the primary placement source for this batch. It is the only fetched source that bands EVERY body area by the size of work it holds - small, medium, large and extra-large - which is what makes the available_area and scale_behavior columns answerable at all. It also supplies the fit rule (“a forearm tattoo shouldn’t wrap so far around the arm that it overlaps”), the design-expansion warning, and two orientation rules. IMPORTANT NEGATIVE FINDING, recorded because it bears directly on what this corpus may claim: the page states “Tattoo placements don’t have any specific meaning tied to them.” That is a Tier 2 trade claim about the modern Western commercial context in which the page is written. IT DOES NOT AND CANNOT SETTLE whether placement carries meaning or restriction in any cultural tradition - two Tier 1 museum sources in this same batch record placements that do. The claim is recorded, scoped, and NOT used to suppress a cultural placement rule anywhere in the corpus.

    professional tattoo source · retrieved 2026-08-30

Related concepts

0 links

No relationship in the corpus touches Knee. The graph is sparse; the type listings carry browsing.