These Gorgeous Photos Celebrate Inuit Women’s Tattoos—And Their Resilience

Cora DeVos paints a picture of her youth: She and her best friend, Hovak Johnston, are high-school students, running down to the Northern Store in Iqaluktuuttiaq (Cambridge Bay), Nunavut, to buy all the polarized film the store carries. Back home, Johnston dresses up in fun outfits—usually teen girl party clothes—and DeVos takes her photo.

This is one of DeVos’ earliest memories with a camera, and some of her and Johnston’s first collaborations.

Today, DeVos is based in Vermilion, Alta., and has evolved from hosting bedroom photo shoots to running her own business, Little Inuk Photography, for more than a decade. The name, she says, is inspired by stories from Inuit elders about little beings who come into the community and wreak havoc. Standing five foot one and self-described as “mischievous,” DeVos says the name is apt.

While DeVos’ photography has expanded considerably from when she and Johnston were young, she has kept true to many of the elements that got her into photography: making connections with and celebrating Inuit women and a commitment to making others feel beautiful in front of the camera.

Her latest project is the “Gold Series,” featuring Inuit women who are traditionally tattooed, painted in gold and photographed on crisp, black backdrops. (The series was on display at the Vancouver Maritime Museum until April 2023.)

The mesmerizing imagery that DeVos created for the series was inspired by the music video for “Zombie” by Irish rock band The Cranberries. The anti-war anthem features lead singer Dolores O’Riordan painted in gold from head to toe. “As soon as I saw that, I took pictures of the screen and I was like, ‘I need to photograph Inuit women this way.’”

Her vision for the series has been well-received by the women in her portraits. They are often giddy and excited about the photos—they leave the shoot still glittering, not wanting to take off the gold and leave the feeling behind. It’s exactly what DeVos had hoped for.

DeVos also reunited with Johnston on the Inuit Tattoo Revitalization Project. She remembers the day Johnston, fascinated by the power and beauty of women who had traditional facial tattoos, told her she wanted to get some of her own. “I always wanted an Inuk woman to do it,” Johnston told Nunavut News in 2016. “But there was nobody practising that traditional tattoo method anymore.”

“I had to Google it,” DeVos says. “I had no idea that it was even part of our culture. That’s how scarce it was in our community at that time.”

Inuit facial tattoos, called tunniit, and body tattoos, called kakiniit, were once common and widely celebrated among Inuit before they were banned by missionaries and other colonial influences who came to the communities in the late 1700s. Tunniit are tied to the Inuit origin story and carry significant meanings. Some markings represent, for instance, an important life milestone, such as getting your first period, or a personal achievement, like birthing a child.

In the years after the tattoos were outlawed, knowledge about the tradition declined, and fewer women were tattooed. But that’s recently changed, with Inuit women like DeVos and Johnston among those championing the reclamation of the practice.

Since getting her own tattoos, Johnston has learned traditional methods of tattooing. For many years, tattooing was done primarily using thread-like material made of caribou sinew, soaked in seal oil and soot, which is then poked with a needle crafted from a bone. Today, tattoo guns or single-needle poking are also common (Johnston uses the latter). With DeVos’ camera to capture the process, the pair has travelled to four communities in the North since 2016—nurturing community along the way.

“The whole [tattooing] is an emotional roller coaster, because there’s so much healing that comes with the tattoos,” DeVos says. “There are women who start out crying before the needle even hits them. And all throughout their tattoo, they’re talking and telling their story, and by the end of the tattoo, it’s like their story has been changed. Like part of them was miss- ing all that time.”

But the project has also been met with some resistance. DeVos’ mother, for example, “is a residential school survivor and was very much affected by the church. Not only did she lose her language from a young age, but she also lost her connection to her culture”—a common experience especially among members of older generations in the community. There remains a great deal of colonial and religious trauma associated with traditional tattoos, which can make them painful or off-putting for some.

“When our project went to Cambridge Bay in 2018, one of my cousins was sitting there, and she has a V [a] on her forehead. And my mom went right up to her and tapped her forehead with her finger. She says, ‘I don’t like that,’” says DeVos.

In some cases, though, seeing the healing and beauty that the tattooing process can bring has helped break down the resistance. That was the case for DeVos’ mother: “She was seeing more and more women come out of the project and being empowered and feeling so good about themselves and the culture,” DeVos says. “One night I got home from the project, and Mom was sitting on the couch crying. She’s like, ‘I think I need to get my tattoo.’” DeVos’ mother now proudly wears her own tunniit.

It’s important to DeVos that Indigenous women, who so often carry the weight of communities on their backs and who hold complex stories, know they deserve to be recognized. “So much of us was taken away [by] from our ancestors,” DeVos says. “Being able to be celebrated freely is really a special thing.”

This, it seems, is the key: More than capturing moments, DeVos’ photos capture a movement of self-love and celebration.

Originally published November 2022; updated November 2023.