Using oral narratives of tattoos and their bodily emplacement, the paper explores the performance of creativity, language and multilingualism, identity and gender among female students at three universities in South Africa. We draw on notions of skinscapes, the material culture of multilingualism and multimodality to illustrate, analyse and discuss the creativity and imagination of the design features of the assembled semiotic material that inspire the content and representations of the tattoo. We highlight the inspirations and explorative imaginations of the tattooed and/or the tattoo artists that enable their creations to be visually materialised and for new meanings to be constructed on the skin. We argue that multilingualism and identities should not just be seen in the inscribed languages on tattoos but in the totality of the material and verbal constituents that includes the languages spoken, heard and referred to in the context in which the artefact is reproduced and consumed. We conclude by emphasising the significance of looking at tattoos as material culture of multilingualism/multiculturalism deployed as a creative practice in meaning making. Skinscapes thus becomes a way of expanding sites within semiotic landscape research to include the human body.