Skin Art and Law: Between Body Protection and Copyright

The recent enthusiasm for tattooing raises legal, ethical, sociological, and economic issues. This article questions how French law captures this phenomenon and what it reveals about the evolution of the conception of the human body in view to its transformation and exploitation as a creation. The possibilities of changing the body oscillate between two principles, that of protection and that of personal autonomy. The body, medium of an artistic work, hinders the prerogatives assigned to the author of the creation. Also, it is in the perspective of the person tattooed and under the prism of the living body through two different moments, before and after the realization of the tattoo, that this article addresses this use of the law in tension.