Tattoo You

January 29, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     Like many people over a certain age I have been watching the proliferation of tattoos among the general public with a mixture of perplexity and grim amusement.  Here's where my age really shows.  When I was growing up the only people I knew who had tattoos were veterans of World War II or Korea, and they were all men.  Usually the tattoos were fairly small and confined to the forearm or upper arm, and focused, subject-wise, on emblems of the military, like eagles or anchors or occasionally mottoes of some kind--Semper Fi, etc.  They would sometimes be a bit more fanciful than that, but not often.  An in-law of mine had acquired a skull with a dagger being driven through it on his upper arm, which he had gotten in the Philippines in 1946.  Our neighbor across the street, who had been in the Navy, had a tattoo of Betty Boop wearing a bra top and a grass skirt.  He claimed that his Betty had originally been naked, but his post-war wife had made him add the clothing.  That was about as risque and imaginative as things got where I came from.  Women most definitely did not have tattoos, at least not any of the women I ever knew, since I did not frequent New Orleans brothels as a kid growing up in the suburbs of Oakland County, Michigan, nor did I ever travel with the circus or know any Maori warriors.  I'm sure jailhouse tattoos existed back then, and that military veterans weren't the only people who got tattoos--there were bikers and other free spirits and degenerates who no doubt had them too.  But as a rule, people didn't have tattoos unless they had had some sort of rather intense experience to go with them.  Tattoos were, if you will, souvenirs of various of life's vicissitudes--warfare, confinement, degradation, solidarity, or utter depravity.  People who had been through nothing of the sort, meaning almost everyone, didn't see the point in having indelible ink on their skin for the rest of their lives, to commemorate things like, say, graduation cum laude from college, or employment at General Motors, or for losing a loved one, or for being a parent for crying out loud.

     It need hardly be said that things are different now.  Today it seems difficult for most folks to find a reason not to get a tattoo.  I chalk this current tendency up to several things.  (You'll notice that the none of the reasons I shall enumerate for the rise in tattoos are positive ones, betraying the fact that I do not view this phenomenon in a very favorable light.)  The first is simple conformism.  People see other people getting tattoos, and they want them too, just as they want to wear certain clothing or hair styles.  This is a characteristic of human behavior that is far older than tattooing, of course.  And it has analogues in the behavior of other animal species, such as lemmings.  The difference between wearing one's hair a certain fashionable way, or having a particular pair of shoes, on the one hand, and getting a tattoo, on the other hand, is or should be obvious to all concerned.  The hair grows out, the shoes can be replaced, but the tattoo will be there until the day you die unless you undergo painful surgery to remove it.  Very few people at the age of forty would wear their hair as they did when they were twenty, nor would they wear the same clothes.  People my children's age look back on photos of themselves from the 1980s and laugh at the big, overstyled and overcurled way they wore their hair, or how they tucked their leggings into their socks and affected the "preppy" look that was best embodied in the character of Ferris Bueller's sister.  My adult children wish to continue to follow fashion, to some degree, and these things just aren't fashionable any more, at their age or any other.  They understand that decisions made in adolescence are almost invariably, well, adolescent, and inherently transitory.  Life has a way of doing that to us.  We start smoking as teenagers, to be cool, and then we get addicted to nicotine, and spend the rest of our lives, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not, trying to kick the habit.  But at least it's possible to do so.  Yet somehow, in a sort of  movement of mass hysteria, teenagers and young adults are getting tattooed, thereby committing the most indelible nonlethal act of youthful indiscretion possible.  And that includes three of my four children, sadly.  True, when they are old and tattooed, they will have plenty of company.  But whatever profound or whimsical or deep meanings the tattoos once had will have gone, and only the blue will remain on their wrinkled skin, looking like irregularly-shaped bruises.  Most of our youthful indiscretions, if they are kept to ourselves, can accompany us to the grave without being noticed by others; but tattoos begotten in the prime of our lives will stay until the last, bearing mute testimony to whatever foolishness led us to get them in the first place.  Meanwhile in a generation or two tattoos will have fallen out of fashion, and will come to represent the hopelessly outdated practices of an older, misguided generation.  The main problem, besides the obvious disfiguring and embarrassing one, is that unless the tattooed people die the day after they get the tattoos, they will almost invariably live to regret them.

     The second reason people get tattoos, slightly more nuanced than the first, is that in general, people lack specific ideas and ideals around which to focus their existences, so they think that by putting some designs on their skin they have sort of joined a club, which I suppose they have done in a way.  The Club of Nincompoops.  They are thereby one with those other folks who have tattoos.  Never mind what the tattoos are, and how varied and unfocused are their messages.  The important thing is that they have ink, like everybody else (or at least everybody else within their narrow frames of reference).  I have occasion to go to a day spa hot spring from time to time, and thus have a chance to see many partially-clothed people of all ages and sizes.  Lacking any common focus for their tattoos, they tend to choose fancy dragon-like designs or collections of Chinese characters--things they saw on others that they sort of liked--or swirly cursive renditions of their children's names and dates of birth, or the dates of death of their close relatives, friends, or who knows who.  Some folks go for large lettering of the names of their wives or girlfriends, or photo-like renditions of their nearest and dearest, without regard to whether they will be so near and so dear in a few years, or will, with the inevitability of gravity, even vaguely resemble those individuals by the time their skin has loosened and sagged.  (I knew a guy about two decades ago who loved Jimi Hendrix, so he got his face tattooed on his arm.  The problem was that it didn't look all that much like Jimi Hendrix, and more like some unnamed Native American.  So he constantly had to explain what the tattoo was.  Well, at least he saw the error of his ways more or less immediately.)  Most tattoos tend to be intensely personal in nature, doubtless reflecting the person's mood and frame of mind at the time they got the tattoos, but without regard for what their mood will be in a few years.  If the people are fat, the tattoos tend to draw attention to the vast expanses of flesh they possess, like the over-sized canvasses of the neoclassical painters of the French Napoleonic period, on which the tattoo artist has to work.  If the people are good-looking--muscular men or women possessed of smooth curvaceous and otherwise unblemished skin, the tattoos mar the fine natural landscapes of their bodies, like random stains on a beautiful piece of fabric or gashes of graffiti on architecturally attractive buildings.  Tattoos enhance natural ugliness and besmirch natural beauty.  And there is essentially no area of the body that is immune from tattoos, from head to foot.

     The third reason for tattoos flows from the second one.  Because most people are socially and morally unfocused, and tend to spend a great deal of their time watching violent cartoon-like and comic book-inspired movies and reading garbage on their smart phones, they have become inured to depictions of extreme absurdity and vulgarity.  Thus they are unable to differentiate the comic book realm from the realm of reality, and are unable to recognize the foolishness of what they see.  Besides that, they're high or stoned much of the time.  They have so much sensory input from all sides, that it's almost as if they are in anti-sensory deprivation chambers, filled not with silence and lack of sensation, but instead with too much meaningless white noise and chaos.  Thus almost devoid of anything that could possibly shock them or wake them up, they come to crave the pain of getting the tattoo itself, and care less what the ink says than what the process of getting it does to them in terms of sharply focused sensory input.  Tattoos in this context are the equivalent of beating your head against the wall, because it feels so good when you stop.  This pain consideration often divides the tattooed people from the untattooed people.  Those who do not particularly like pain, and have found enough in life to stimulate them in more focused ways, tend not to get tattoos.  These latter folks are, not coincidentally, on the whole more intelligent and better educated, too.

      Another reason for tattoos, perhaps wrapped in the tendrils of the previous ones, is narcissism.  The social media and recent technologies have instilled in practically everyone who uses them a sense of preoccupation with themselves in a way that was never before possible except among the insane or insufferable.  Facebook says to the world, "Here's what I think, where I am, what I'm eating or enjoying, and what amuses me or pisses me off," whether anyone is interested or not.  Twitter says, "This is what I'm thinking RIGHT NOW, in 280 characters or less," whether anyone is interested or not.  Instagram says, "Here's what I look like RIGHT NOW, as I'm in the act of saying or doing whatever I feel like saying or doing," whether anyone is interested or not.  (This very blog, I'll admit, is an instance of the social media, except that it's much less accessible, which is why I have about eight followers, instead of 11,000, which in turn is why the things I say won't have much of an effect on others.)  All this wasn't possible a generation ago, and so people didn't assume that anyone necessarily gave a rat's ass about their innermost thoughts and opinions, or what they look like while acting foolish at any given moment, which, in point of fact, most people don't.  This was a good thing, because it tended to keep people's egos in check, not to mention allowing people time to think about what they might say and do, and often wisely to decide not to say and do those things.  Ah, the lost art of impulse control.  Tattoos precisely reflect the narcissism and lack of impulse control created and fostered by the social media, only in a much more indelible way.  They say, in a way nothing else can do, LOOK AT ME (and see what a fool I am).

     The next reason for tattoos is akin to body dysmorphia.  That's the condition in which people completely lose sight of the objective realities of their bodies.  They become obsessed with self-perceived flaws, often leading them to diet excessively and unhealthily, or to get plastic surgeries that end up going right past mildly corrective and into freakishly disfiguring.  Yet they do not realize how ugly they look, with their fish lips and taut skin and outlandishly high cheeks.  As it occurs in tattooing, it is what causes people to get more and more tattoos, thinking that if one tattoo looks good (to them or a few other similarly tattooed people) then additional ones will look even better.  Eventually they're covered with tattoos in a way that would make a freak in the employ of P. T. Barnum positively green with envy.  It is akin to the phenomenon in a certain society of stretching the lips and putting plates in them until they stick out half a foot or so, and calling that beauty.  Almost everyone from outside that society can see how absurd that is, and regards it as ugly and disfiguring.  Except, that is, for that small group.  In a few years, millions and millions of people are going to be looking at the tattooed people of today and shaking their heads, wondering what they were (or more likely weren't) thinking.   

   The last reason for the great proliferation of tattoos, and surely the most important one, is a sort of corollary to all the rest of them, or more accurately the overarching reason for them, and that is stupidity.  The abundance of pure unadulterated idiocy among humans is staggering, and nowhere is it more evident or inexcusable than in tattoos.  People look back to the Middle Ages and say that folks were really ignorant.  And in terms of technological knowledge we certainly have come a long way since then.  But at the core of our beings we are still as ingenuous and superstitious and just plain toe-stubbingly doltish as we were when we dragged our knuckles on the ground.  There are many more of us on the planet, and we're healthier on the whole and better able to get around.  But we're just as benighted as ever.  And nowhere is our inherent stupidity more in evidence than in the phenomenon of tattooing.  Where once (and sometimes now as well) tattoos were the symbols of a comparatively narrow shared experience, like being in war, or prison, or a gang, today they are evidence of nothing much at all, except the silliness of wanting to be like others, without regard to the consequences.

     What's to be done?  Well, nobody asked me for my opinion, but I think that this thing, as I've suggested, will just have to play itself out, going the way of the powdered wig, the wing collar, and the tie-dyed t-shirt.  All things must come to an end, eventually.  In the meantime, it seems to me that with what we know about the human body, not to mention chemistry, someone could come up with a tattooing process, or an ink, that naturally fades and goes away completely after, say, five to seven years.  How goddamned difficult could that be?   We already know that some tattoo ink colors naturally fade more quickly than others.  If all tattoos had a comparatively short life, tattoo artists could stay in business, and people could, after coming to their senses, go back to having the skin they were born with.  Hell, under those circumstances, I might even get a tattoo.  Maybe one that says, "Stupid for a day."