The 1990s witnessed an explosion in the popularity of tattooing across Western societies, driven by celebrity culture, the mainstreaming of punk and rock aesthetics, the influence of the Modern Primitives movement, and increased media coverage. Tattoo studios proliferated in high streets and shopping centres; new styles emerged including tribal revival, biomechanical, and photorealistic work; and academic and artistic institutions began to take body modification seriously as a cultural phenomenon. By the end of the decade, tattooing had become one of the fastest-growing retail industries in the United States.

The 1990s tattoo renaissance coincided with and contributed to an explosion of literary and theoretical writing about the body, from Judith Butler's theorisation of bodily performativity to Paul Connerton's work on embodied social memory. Poets including Sharon Olds and Ai were writing extensively about marked and modified bodies during this decade, and the tattoo began to appear as an explicit literary subject and metaphor in mainstream American poetry collections. The decade's body-obsessed cultural moment produced a generation of poets for whom the tattooed body was a primary figure of identity, memory, and self-authorship.