| Summary: | Ketut is a 32-year-old man who works as a hotel courier for alcoholic beverages. Like many other young Balinese men with tattoos, he is caught in a night life-related contractual job. Some such men work as security guards for various entertainment facilities, including pubs and clubs at Kuta Beach. Ketut is a member of one of Bali’s powerful youth organisations or, in Scott’s (2015) term, youth gangs that require tattoos for membership. It is this youth organisation that provides access to such lucrative entertainment jobs. Ketut’s junior high school diploma has not enabled him to find the decent and stable job in the army that his father desired; his opportunities were limited by the tattoos he has started inking on his body since his teenage years. Thus, in Ketut’s eyes, this youth organisation is an important source of survival, a means of sustaining his livelihood. However, having tattooed his body since junior high school, Ketut admits that the tattoos he made during his teenage years served a different function than more recent ones. His earlier tattoos were mainly acts of rebellion against his authoritarian father. The more recent ones, especially the tattoo crafted between his thumb and index finger as part of his organisation’s membership requirements, is not only about rebellion. It is also part of his social identity—a symbol of membership in a group in which he takes pride. Ketut tells a story of marginalisation and the strategies of the marginalised in claiming citizenship. Constructing an identity as a ‘son of a bitch’ in the eyes of the State not only shows his strong resentment towards the state, but also his feeling that the State denies his rights as a citizen to be a part of (State-related) formal labour markets.
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