Posted on 09/03/2006 9:25:39 PM PDT by neverdem
TATTOOS
We now have to work under the assumption that every American has a tattoo.
Whether we are at a formal dinner, at a professional luncheon, at a sales conference or arguing before the Supreme Court, we have to assume that everyone in the room is fully tatted up — that under each suit, dress or blouse, there is at least a set of angel wings, a barbed wire armband, a Chinese character or maybe even a fully inked body suit. We have to assume that any casual anti-tattoo remark will cause offense, even to those we least suspect of self-marking.
Everybody who has been to the beach this summer has observed that tattoos are now everywhere. There are so many spider webs, dolphins, Celtic motifs and yin-yang images spread across the sands, it looks like a New Age symbology conference with love handles.
A study in The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology showed that about 24 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 50 have at least one tattoo, up from about 15 percent in 2003. Thirty-six percent of those between 18 and 29 have a tattoo. Pretty soon you’ll go to the beach and find that only the most hardened nonconformists will be unmarked. Everybody else will be decorated with gothic-lettered AARP logos and Katie Couric 4-EVER tributes, and Democrats will have their Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers scratched across their backs so even their morticians will know which way they voted.
In a forthcoming essay in The American Interest, David Kirby observes that there are essentially two types of tattoo narratives, the Record Book and the Canvas. Record Book tattoos commemorate the rites of passage in a life. Canvas tattoos are means of artistic expression.
So some people will have their kids’ faces tattooed across...
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
I don't have a tattoo and never will. They look okay on young people (sort of), but when you get old and that skin wrinkles and sags, ugh.
Seriously, if people want to get tattoos, so what? It used to be smoking, now it is tattoos, a lot healthier.
Not me. I wouldn't wear the same shirt every day. Why would I want the same sign?
Hmmm. Do they tell smokers they can't give blood? Because I understand they don't allow tattoo-bearers to give blodd. (personally I can't give blood because I lived in England for more than six months.)
Count me among the "I just don't get it" crowd. 99% of tattos look like cr@p.
The occasional 22 y.o. hard body or stud athelete can pull it off. Otherwise fu-ge-da-bout-it.
I know a couple of tattoo jokes that would get thrown out of FR.
I love the AARP reference. If I ever got one, that is what I'd do.
Sums up the article nicely. 1950s beatniks saw their outcast fashions (and often their lifestyle as well) turn into the mainstream by the late 60s, and now the tattoed tribal-wannabe types of a few years back have seen their fashions hit the mainstream as well. .....the endless longing to be cool.
Unless you get hepatitis C.
Older editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica mentioned that most tattooed people in our culture had serious mental problems: it was a clincal sign of psychosis. Maybe that is not true anymore. Or maybe a very big proportion of society is going bonkers! I have found modern articles reporting that tattoos are more prevalent among jail populations and mental patients than the general population. Piercing would seem to be a form of self-mutilation, and it is hard to see how someone normal would do such a thing as put a ring through the tongue. This may be a form of acting out self-hatred, or expressing a desire for physical degradation and punishment.
Anyway, most tatoos I see are unimaginative (as this article points out). I think that there is something very sinister about tatoos. In Jewish law, they are forbidden.
I do not think that tattoos on women are at all sexy: they look too much like dirt. I think nice, clean skin is much more attractive. If I want graffiti, I can find plenty of it elsewhere.
Another madcow sufferer! Another 5 yrs and we'll be able to do it again - the prions should have ramped up 3 years ago if PrP was going to be a disease.
Personally, I think tattoos are pretty much idiotic.
Sorry, that's the way I see it.
And there's a reason: $150 to get it done, $1000 or more to get it removed when you realize what a mistake it was.
ROFLMAO
Tatoos are so...."all about me". Kinda pitiful.
It must be something in the water there at the Slimes.
The eminent author and psychiatrist Theodor Dalrymple said in one of his essays in his widely acclaimed book, "Life at The Bottom: The Worldview That Makes The Underclass", that not all people who have tatoos are criminals but ALL criminals have tatoos.
Perhaps because he's British he was referring to them. But can we make some sort of non-scientific conjecture here?
I have no tatoos. I don't want a tatoo. I don't plan on ever getting a tatoo. I also have no piercings. My children were told they could tatoo or pierce anything they want, when they turn 18 and move out of my home. My son's waited until they had moved out to get a tatoo. Earrings are worn by my daughters, but nothing else. Tatoos on most people are not all that attractive, especially when they've gone overboard,IMHO.
Apparently having a tattoo can also cause skin cancer, because the skin under the tattoo is thinner afterwards, making it more susceptible under sunlight. Just what I heard.
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