During the Japanese period Muromachi (period of the "Lords of the War" or of the "War States") the punishment that criminals often received was the mutilation of the ears, nose or hands.
After Muromachi period (ended on 1573) and Momoyana period (ended on 1603), during the Edo period (or Tokugawa period) lasted to 1868, the mutilations has being slowly replaced by tattoos on the skins of guilty people. As well as the Japanese justice system didn't use the emprisonment as a punishment for sentenced people (emprisonment was used only to keep on jail persons who were waiting for sentence) the punishments were often by exposure, flogging (not used to women) and banning. Often the banning were preceded by a parade on a donkey back along the most crowded ways of Edo (now Tokyo): people used to toss vegetables and to spit to the punished. Public blaming was a very powerful punishment tool during the "honor fullfill" Edo period, more if the punished criminal was an aristocratic dignitary or a high ranking samurai.
Moreover, in order to keep memory about the criminal career of someone, the outcast people were called to the work to mark whit tattoos the skin of the outlaws, on the face mostly. The tattoos were symbols for their crime, shape and colors marked what they did and when and where.
Public blaming, in this way, stands eternaly on the skins of criminals and their presence worked as a powerful remind to people about the Shogun autority. About two hundred years of Shogun dictatorial government in Japan had built a so deep cultural inprinting that in the Japanese culture the tattoos were signs of guilty still to the past century and nowadays, still, old people look at tattoed people as former criminal or something similar.
Moreover In the 1960’s, yakuza movies came out in the Japanese market and became very popular. Because these masculine characters were all characterized with having tattoos, the image of “tattoo = yakuza” was born.
Neither the western (european and north american) culture had considered tattooed people as high ranked people. Sailormen and convicts as well as whores and gypsies had little chance to attend an aristocratic fox-hunting party and God-afraid-people frequentations. All of them had, more or less, a lot of time to spent in marking their skins with tattoos and the interest in telling their lifestory with images and, often, initiatic symbols whose meanning was knew only in their own clans and class.
In ages of violence and illiteracy was very useful to show "who is myself" by drawings, symbols and pictures tattooed on the skin. A sign is, you know, better of one thousand of words. A knife on an arm is a knife in every place of the world, in every of seven seas.
In this way, while to be tattooed stands for to be outcast people, it also come back to the original, tribal and antropological meaning of living-life telling, social ranking marker, esotheric symbology.
I've studied a lot about it, do you see it 😉 ?
So, to the answer: I prefer tattooed models because, in a way or another, they are telling me about their life before they speek with me the first time. And I have question about their life, their tattoos, before I meet them.
Maybe I don't ask at the very first shooting but set after set, taking photographs and postproducing the sets I learn the shape and the color of their signs, the geographyc placement of their marks, the stratifications of their symbols.
Set after set I can explore the mind behind the body, the link betwen the flesh, the body and the soul that tattoos meaning.
Maybe none of this is true: maybe the tattoo doesn't mean nothing else "I saw it, I liked it, I ask for it". In any case ahestetic taste is a part of a person, an image is a message and a message has meaning itself and is done to comunicate. Nothing we do can be done whitout it become a message.
Better if message is a very well done tattoo on the skin of a beautiful woman.
Do you agree?