Boo-hoo: Not another tattoo
Self-mutilation used to be a symptom of a mental disorder. But over the last 10 years or so it has been mainstreamed in the form of tattoos. They seem to be plastered all over most of the under-30 set.
Take for example a girl who tends a sandwich shop in downtown Spokane where I work. She is otherwise just what you want to see in a girl in late adolescence -beautiful eyes, lips, figure, sweet of voice, smiling, engaging. But emblazoned around her neck is a string of baroque curlicues, miniature stars and twisting strings in blue, red, yellow and green, circling from front to back almost up to her chin. It's hard not to stare in wonder at the utter stupidity of it, and the borderline criminality of the tattooist who inflicted this mess on her. Looking at this poor girl, otherwise pretty, makes me wince. I almost have to go to a different sandwich shop, so troubling is the view of her.
Perhaps worst of all is Angelina Jolie, one of God's most magnificent creations, who decided that drawing all over her body would be a really neat thing. It isn't.
Tattoos nowadays are not only pictures of dragons, swords, hearts - the stuff of second-rate cartoon strips. Words - poems, aphorisms, names - are also scratched onto backs and necks. Some even perch curiously in women's cleavage and other body parts I deem to be sacred, not to be scarred with the pen-and-ink scribblings of a tattooist.
Tattoos used to be the kind of thing only a sailor on shore leave would get after consuming too much tequila. Later in life the sailor's kid, seeing a tattoo of a woman's name on his father's arm, asks, "Who's Rachel? Mom's name is Martha." Dad, embarrassed, says, "Well, that's the vestige of hangovers past."
Now the tattoo has become an object of pride. "Great tat, dude!" It's hard to find young people without at least one.
As with all cultural fads, like the long hair of the '60s and '70s and the skin-head look of the '90s, the proliferating tattoo trend started as a ridiculous attempt at self-definition among the young. How to define oneself over against the crowd. Then the crowd starts doing it and, paradoxically, the practice becomes a tired cliche, the exact opposite of expressing one's individuality. You're not unique; you're just the same as the next idiot who has besmirched nature's most beautiful blank canvas, the human skin.
It is described by some as art. I don't get that. Most of it is something that would garner a C- in a high-school art class. Anyway, why do you want a picture on your body, no matter how visually stunning it might be? The Mona Lisa is great art, but I don't want a replica of it splashed across my chest.
As kids we used to draw on ourselves with pens. Parents and teachers would become outraged. Nowadays every sort of cartoonish design is blasted on the body. There simply is no possibility that tattoos can be artful. The canvas is, by its very nature, ever changing, elastic, doesn't take ink well, and over time it droops and wrinkles. The means of applying it - sort of like a dentist's drill shooting ink - cannot display nuance of brush stroke. The drawings are crude, childish, no matter the alleged skill of the "artist."
Tattoos are forever (but see below under "dermatologists"). What are people going to think of these hideous blemishes on their bodies 20 or 30 years from now? They all fade over time, eventually becoming ecchymotic purple-blue splotches. "Did someone hit you?" "No, it's just an old tattoo." When you're in your 40s and beyond, you want to display sophistication, but the billboard of tattoos spread across one's body shouts a different message.
Tattoos have spawned two industries, one that puts them on and another that takes them off. Dermatologists and tattooists are making a killing from the mass hysteria that is the tattoo craze. (Although query whether any tattoo can be fully removed. I suspect the outlines remain, like a dermatological palimpsest.)
Tattoos tend to limit one's employment prospects. They give the impression of uncouthness, poor education, self-destructiveness, a slight mental illness. Those old enough will remember a line from "My Fair Lady" when Henry Higgins observes, "How an Englishman speaks absolutely classifies him." Same with tattoos.
My final thought brings me back to my life in Los Angeles, where I used to go to a Jewish bakery on the West Side to buy rye bread. I would be waited on by an old woman with numbers tattooed on her forearm, the remnants of her life in the Nazi death camps where your identification number was scrawled permanently into your skin. I suspect she is of two minds on her involuntary branding. She could despise it for what it represents. Or she could wear it proudly as a symbol of what must not ever happen again.
But there is no such nobility in what the current generation is doing to mar their bodies.
End of my rant. Unfortunately it won't be the end of tattoos.
Karl Kime is a local attorney.