Tattooed
How many times have you seen movies where during a wild and crazy night, the protagonist goes the last yard and wakes up the next morning with a crazy tattoo in a crazy place on his or her body. If it’s a guy, the tattoo is something too cute for words and it’s in a spot where all his friends can see it to make fun of him. If it’s a girl, the tattoo is in a sexually suggestive spot that no one can see except the man who takes her to the altar. In both cases, the tattoo is a cause of great embarrassment and is likely to be a lifelong source of regret for the lapse of judgement of a moment. I’m thinking Roger Stone woke up the morning after getting his Nixon tattoo on his back feeling some combination of embarrassment and regret. The good news was that he didn’t have to look at it. The bad news was that he would have to claim to be proud of it for the next fifty years.
Tattoos have always been an interesting psychological phenomenon. They have now become more of a sociological phenomenon, I think. Tattoos used to be a gesture of rebelliousness and now they are a strange blend of conformity and hipness. Originally, tattoos were largely ceremonial and used to identify and establish status of individuals. It is fairly well-accepted that the origins of tattooing as we think of it today came from the islands of the South Pacific. In fact, the derivation of the word tattoo comes from Polynesian and no one uses tattoos more than the Maori tribes of New Zealand. There and in places as ancient as Papua New Guinea start tattooing their children from a young age and establish their social and tribal status with these body markings.
In trying to do some temporal research about tattooing, I feel the need to establish that many more people get tattooed now than when I was young. Shocking as it may sound, there were only 40 registered tattoo artists in America in 1975, the year I graduated from college. At that time, tattoos had migrated from sailors to bad boy motorcyclists, but not much further. Interesting side note is that sailors got tattoos for a very practical reason. It was not uncommon in the Eighteenth Century for sailors to get “Shanghaied”. The methods of identifying men was sketchy and the ambiguity was grounds for shrugging off claims by sailors that they were being unjustly detained in service. A good and unique tattoo was a fine way to file a meaningful and verifiable identification challenge and was thus a source of freedom to many seamen. Thus, most of those few tattoo artists that existed, plied their craft in harbor towns. The rough and tumble of the docks attracts the rough and tumble of the streets and hence bikers found their way to tattoo land.
As recently as a dozen years ago, studies pegged the number of Americans with tattoos at 14%. The most recent studies put that percentage at 46% now, and that still leaves the United States as only the third most tattooed citizenry in the world. Strangely enough (at least to me), the top tattoo locale is Italy at 48% with Sweden wedging itself into the runner-up spot at 47%. And the demographics of tattoo are not what you might expect. While the carnival midway freak shows one hundred years ago often featured among its oddities a tattooed lady, the gender stigma of tattoo is long gone. More women sport tattoos than men now. Middle-aged people are getting tattooed at a faster and faster pace and starting to catch up their age cohort to the Millennials and other younger generations. And perhaps the most surprising statistic is that college-educated people are now more likely to sport body ink than uneducated people. The stigma of tattoo has gone, or at least is going fast.
All three of my kids went to my Alma Mater, Cornell. My oldest son did not surprise me by getting a tattoo of his DJ business logo on his shoulder. It was a Celtic symbol called a Triskel. What did surprise me was when he hot his tongue pierced with a metal stud. This was a kid who hated applying chapstick when a child, so how he could stand the strangeness of a piece of metal in his mouth was beyond me. I think he now has four tattoos and to my knowledge, no regrets. My daughter does not have a tattoo, but she followed her brother’s track and got a pierced tongue….yeesh! Her multiple ear piercings are the only other freak flags I see her fly. My youngest made it all the way through Cornell without a tattoo or a pierced tongue. But just recently he went to the trouble of working with an Australian artist on a tattoo of his own creation. It represents a road through the forrest that ends in the planets of our solar system. He has explained its significance to me, but my daughter’s four-year-old daughter did a better job by stating one day, “that’s got a lot going on with it for a tattoo.”
None of my kids’ tattoos or piercings concerned me. I saw them as their generation’s howl at the moon, like when my generation grew out its hair and put on its BlueJeans. One of my nephews and two of my nieces’ spouses have the full tattooed shoulders that are so popular these days. It’s all good and truth be told, I consider body art interesting and not just not offensive, I find it quite cool.
In fact, twenty years ago, I walked into the same tattoo parlor in Ithaca that my oldest son had used and I got a tattoo on my left upper arm of a design created by my daughter. It is the logo of my motorcycle club, AFMC. I had founded the club five years before that and felt strongly that it represented a meaningful life commitment to motorcycling. Every time I have looked at my arm for twenty years, I have been happy that I got the tattoo. Yes, it has been a differentiator for me. Yes, it was a perfect symbol of my passion. But mostly, I liked the way the artwork looked on my arm. I like that half of my t-shirts sport that same image on their breast as part of my AFMC wardrobe. I even have a motorcycle trailer with a three-foot-wide version of the tattoo on its side. I find all of that a lot of fun. It doesn’t make me special, but I do get lots of pleasure from it. That’s a strong defense of the tattoo all by itself.
The statistics show that somewhere between 38% and 72% of tattoo-bearing people do not regret their tattoos. That’s a wide spread that represents national trends with free-wheeling Italy at the high and buttoned-up Denmark at the low. Anyway you slice it, 28-62% of tattooed people wish they hadn’t done it. I, for one, have never has one nanosecond of regret. An interesting and complex issue is the likelihood that any of us with tattoos would or would not get another tattoo. I have no interest in another. I’m betting my kids are done too. Who knows what that says about getting tattooed.