Patti Smith's debut album Horses (1975), featuring Robert Mapplethorpe's iconic cover photograph of Smith in a deliberately androgynous and transgressive pose, marked the moment the rock-poet persona achieved its most fully realised literary and bodily expression. Smith, who had published poetry since the early 1970s, fused French Symbolism, Beat poetics, and rock performance in a way that treated her body as a primary poetic instrument. While not primarily about tattooing, Horses crystallised the culture of deliberate bodily self-inscription and presentation that included tattoo culture as one of its key elements.

Patti Smith's integration of poetic text and bodily performance directly influenced the spoken-word and slam poetry movements that emerged from the late 1970s, in which the body's appearance and modification became part of the poem's total meaning. Her engagement with Rimbaud, whom she identified as a central influence, reinforced the line of French Symbolist body-poetics running through Morrison into contemporary performance poetry. Smith's example demonstrated that the poet's body — its modification, presentation, and performance — was inseparable from the literary work itself.