In 1970, San Francisco tattooist Lyle Tuttle tattooed rock icon Janis Joplin with a wristlet bracelet design and a small Florentine ornament on her chest, the first widely publicised instance of a major counterculture celebrity wearing tattoos. Tuttle's tattooing of Joplin — photographed and covered extensively in Rolling Stone and other magazines — introduced body modification to a new middle-class and youth audience for whom it represented authentic counterculture identity rather than criminal or lower-class deviance. The event is often cited as a watershed moment in the social history of tattooing in the United States.

Joplin's tattoos were part of a broader counterculture project of reclaiming the body as a site of personal and political expression that ran through the poetry and music of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Beat and confessional poets including Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, and Diane di Prima had been exploring the body's social meanings for a decade; Tuttle's mainstreaming of the celebrity tattoo gave that project a new visual register. The connection between tattooing and rock poetry — from Jim Morrison to Patti Smith — helped establish body modification as part of the literary and cultural vocabulary of rebellion.