[SamAdams76]

As a white collar hiring authority any applicant sporting tattoos or body piercings immediately informs me that he has no judgment. That's an automatic reject. There are plenty of applicants who have worked hard and made good personal decisions available for the second interview.

That is true. Fair or not, a tattoo immediately identifies one as one of the lower classes. I told my millennial children that and none of them has a tattoo as a result, despite some peer pressure to do so.

Never understood it, even when I was younger - back in the 1980s. I was in the Marine Corps then and the only ones that had tattoos were those who got very drunk out in town and ended up in a tattoo parlor where they would have a globe & anchor tattooed to their forearm like they were Popeye or some figure of a girl or whatnot.

Anybody with a tattoo on their neck or face were considered to be a felon who served time in prison. Recent example was Aaron Hernandez, the recent NFL player who went to prison for murder and ended up killing himself.

[DakotaGator]

Great that your children listened to you! Hard for kids not to jump onto the tattoo bandwagon. But making that choice is a step they take towards personal maturity.

Armed forces tattoos almost always are accompanied with a bar story. Falls under the “seemed like a good idea at the time” category ;-)

Prison ink is the worst example of self branding. In Japan the only ones tattooed used to be members of the Yakuza. Normal Japanese were mystified by tattooed Americans.