Harriet Richardson, a 30-year-old content creator known for building entire “performance pieces” out of her dating life, has unveiled her most recent stunt: tattooing the names of every ex-lover’s mother onto her torso.
The revelation came during an interview after Richardson spent months quietly preparing the piece, titled Temporary.
Highlights
- The artist says the tattoo merges “disposable” and “revered” womanhood in a single performance piece.
- The project sparked backlash, with critics calling it obsessive, self-centered, and ethically questionable.
- Richardson now uses the tattoo as a dating filter, requiring future partners to give their mother’s name up front.
According to her, the tattoos are meant to represent the tension between women who are revered, such as mothers, and women who are not, such as, in her words, “wh*res.”
By inscribing the name of every “mother-in-law” she’s ever had, she’s placing those women on a pedestal while casting herself in the role of the “disposable” one.
An influencer tattooed the name of every mother of her exes on her torso as an “art piece”
Image credits: hatsrichardson
Richardson says the idea took shape during her first Edinburgh Fringe, one of the world’s largest arts festivals, where she found herself surrounded by male comedians.
While she never specified what any of them actually did to trigger her, their mere existence irritated her, and, as is consistent with her brand, she used that irritation as creative inspiration.
Image credits: hatsrichardson
“I have genuinely started to believe that God put them on the earth to annoy ideas out of me,” she said, picturing the men as divine-given tools existing for the sole purpose of inspiring her.
From there, her thinking veered into what she calls the “Madonna-Wh*re complex:” women she believes men treat as disposable versus women they place on pedestals.
Image credits: hatsrichardson
The idea led her to the next step: assigning her own body to the “disposable” category and elevating her ex-lovers’ mothers to the “revered” role.
She then decided to “merge” the two by tattooing the mothers’ names onto herself.
Richardson selected fourteen names, covering every relationship she counts as significant, “all the way from her first teenage boyfriend to her most recent break-up.”
“I was very conscious not to use men’s names,” she said. “The people that are, arguably, more important to me than the men. The women who raised them.”
Richardson resorted to online stalking and even hiring private investigators to get the full names of all of the mothers
Image credits: hatsrichardson
Finding the names became its own fixation. Twelve came easily from memory and old diaries, for the rest she resorted to less conventional methods.
Two came from stalking the social media of her exes, and two from hiring a private investigator, a decision she defended.
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“It’s open access information and free will,” she said. “It’s not invasive. You can’t say it’s unethical. Or at least, it’s no more unethical than having s*x with me and then not speaking to me again.”
She even used an excuse from a man who had ghosted her, claiming he’d forgotten a date because of his dad’s birthday, to extract both parents’ names. “As soon as he said it, I went and wrote the name down in, like, 10 places.”
Image credits: hatsrichardson
Richardson then reframed the tattoo from a record of past partners into a tool for “screening” future ones.
Any man who wants to date her must give his mother’s name upfront, fully aware of what she intends to do with it. If they end up sleeping together, she said she will go straight to a tattoo studio the next morning and have the name permanently added to the list.
“It’s a hard boundary that I now have to exercise,” she explained. “It means they see the real me very quickly. They can’t have s*x with me unless they know me.”
The rest of the influencer’s content range from suggestive photos, to exaggerated claims about her love life
Image credits: hatsrichardson
Richardson, who describes herself as a feminist and someone “addicted” to intimacy, dismissed critics who questioned the tattoos as self-objectification.
“I feel like I’m taking control and power back. I don’t really have much else to say apart from: it was my choice. There’s nothing more feminist than a woman making a choice about her own body.”
Six months later, she says she has grown attached to the list. She jokes about imagining the mothers all “squished together” with her in the shower or running with her at the gym.
“None of them chose to be connected,” she said. “But now they are.”
Image credits: hatsrichardson
Beyond the tattoos, the rest of Richardson’s career revolves around exaggerated, self-centered stories.
These include claims such as going on “100 dates in a day,” “yearning for 1000 men in 24 hours,” announcing sudden celibacy, or even fabricating a fake romance with Mark Zuckerberg.
Every project has one thing in common: she’s at the center of the narrative. Perhaps most emblematic of her brand is an image in which she’s seen making out with herself.
"Cringe." Netizens took to social media to share their thoughts on Richardson's tattoo
