Deeper Than Dermis: Tattooing as Magical Ritual with Grace Howarth - LIVE

Please note this is NOT a ZOOM Lecture but an in person lecture. Tickets include a complimentary glass of . Doors open at 6:30pm and talk starts at 7pm

Deeper Than Dermis is an illustrated lecture exploring tattooing as a form of contemporary magical and ritual practice. Drawing on her MA research in Magic and Occult Science and her lived experience as a professional tattoo artist, Grace Howarth reframes tattooing not as decoration or subculture, but as an embodied rite shaped by intention, pain, consent, time, and transformation.

The talk approaches skin as a liminal threshold rather than a surface, and tattooing as a ritual act that alters the body, memory, and sense of self. Grace explores tattooing as spellwork and sigil craft, where repeated symbols, marks, and gestures act apotropaically, binding intention into flesh.

Themes include ritual mark making across cultures, the magical function of pain and endurance, the tattoo studio as a modern ritual chamber, and the ways vulnerability, altered states, and care arise through the tattoo process. The lecture also considers how tattoos continue to function long after their making, as living talismans carried through time.

This is not a technical lecture on tattooing, but an accessible and esoteric exploration of why humans mark themselves, how magic persists within contemporary secular spaces, and how the body becomes a site of ritual and transformation.

Grace Howarth is a UK based artist and professional tattooist working at the intersection of ritual, embodiment, and contemporary magical practice. She holds an MA in Magic and Occult Science, with a dissertation titled Deeper Than Dermis: Tattooing as a Magical Ritual. Her work approaches tattooing as an act of transformation, a deliberate rite shaped by intention, consent, pain, time, and care.

Her practice is informed by academic experience in archaeology, philosophy, teaching, and creative writing. These lineages shape how she understands the body as a site of inscription, how marks accumulate meaning across time, and how knowledge is transmitted through gesture, repetition, and language. Tattooing, for Grace, is a form of embodied authenticity. A way of thinking, remembering, and speaking through the skin. Marks become declarations, the body a living grimoire.

Working across multidisciplinary art forms and research led workshops, she treats skin as a threshold rather than a surface. Her work draws on sigil craft, apotropaic imagery, and ritual mark making, with a particular focus on bodily autonomy, chosen identity, and the quiet power of self authored transformation. Queerness enters her practice not as a theme but as a way of moving through the work, through the refusal of fixed narratives, the redefinition of symbols, and the holding of care as an active, embodied practice.

Alongside her tattoo practice, Grace develops lectures and workshops that explore ritual marking across cultures, the tattoo studio as a contemporary ritual chamber, and the ethics of vulnerability, attention, and consent. Her work is grounded in the belief that magic persists within everyday spaces, and that tattoos function as living talismans carried through time on the body. Her current work includes an upcoming artist residency at the Kolaj Institute in New Orleans, alongside sigil based workshops at the Copenhagen Occult Club’s Witches Camp, focused on mark making as embodied ritual process.

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The venue opens at 18:30. Doors will close at 19:00 to avoid disrupting the speaker. We kindly ask that all guests arrive before 19:00. Refunds are not possible for in person events with less than seven days notice in any circumstances.

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