Itineraries of Dispossession: Pilgrimage Tattoos, Maps, and Memory from Cilicia to Beirut to Jerusalem

In this article, I describe how I came to read my Armenian grandmother’s Jerusalem pilgrimage tattoos as maps. These tattoo maps linked the now disconnected routes and geographies of Armenian life across Cilicia, Beirut and Palestine. Her stories about the pilgrimage tattoos centered her childhood memories of Beirut, a city whose urban form was deeply shaped by ongoing displacement, violence and dispossession. To read my grandmother’s tattoos as maps is to read against the grain of existing political boundaries in a time of accumulating catastrophes and ongoing erasures that cannot be framed as past events.