Thoughtfully inked up

I feel I may be one of the last people of my generation who doesn’t like tattoos (or wild piercings). I got one of each when I was 18, but I started disliking both after only three years. The piercing came out and closed up, and thankfully the tattoo is small and in a place people rarely see.

I have two reasons for disliking tattoos—one aesthetic and the other intellectual. I can explain the aesthetic reason pretty simply: I don’t like the way tattoos look. I think the human body looks pretty nice the way it is, and tattoos just muck it up. Small body modifications like the standard earlobe piercing don’t bother me, because they just frame the face, which the eye is drawn to anyway. But a tattoo on the arm, leg, chest, or wherever else draws the eye in the same way a scar does. It just makes for inelegant design, like slapping stickers on a Ferrari.

My intellectual reason for disliking tattoos is more complex, probably because people come up with complex ways of intellectualizing their tattoos. Once in a while you might find someone who admits their tattoos are purely for aesthetics, saying something like “They just look cool.” I would disagree, but the discussion would end there. 

Hardly anyone says this, though. Most people say their tattoos represent something. I’ve heard girls say, “I got a bird because it represents freedom to me,” or “I got a butterfly because it symbolizes change.” Not everyone has explanations this trite, but the explanations still follow the same template: “I got x because it means y.”

When I was 18 I would have agreed with this thinking. Sure, if something means something to you, why not get it stamped on your body? Now that thinking seems bafflingly odd. If some object or image carries meaning for you, wouldn’t it be far more powerful to create something based around that object or image? If birds represent freedom to you, why not paint one, sculpt one, photograph one, or write a poem about one? Having done one of those things, you probably will have expressed your feelings about birds more clearly, and you will have done it in a way that can be shared with more people.

Many would protest that a tattoo is art. That may be true, but it’s the art of the tattoo artist, not the person wearing it. Few people have any hand in the design of their tattoos, and even those who do are still leaving the final creation of it to someone else. If a tattoo is art, it’s art commissioned to a stranger. Surely the image has lost some of its meaning by the wearer being so far removed from it.

But there’s nothing wrong with decoration, right? A painting by someone else can be meaningful enough to you that you choose to hang it in your living room. But there’s something different going on with tattoos. The painting in the living room is pretty easy to look away from. Tattoos—even artistic ones, even small ones—are conspicuous, mainly because of our innate visual interest in other human beings. Having an artistic tattoo is sort of like walking around with the Mona Lisa screen-printed on a t-shirt. It looks like an advertisement for one’s taste in art.

I think that’s basically what tattoos are—advertisements. They’re more about vanity and group acceptance than they are about self expression. The hope is that someone will see it and think the wearer cool, smart, sophisticated, deep, passionate, etc. Even those  who get tattoos in very private places are still hoping some special boy or girl will see it one day and think those things. 

Creative works (including blogs, heh heh) definitely have an element of vanity to them as well, but their is far more effort involved in making them than their is in getting a tattoo. Also, significantly, a blog or a painting typically isn’t thrust in the faces of friends, lovers, and random people on the street. If I wore a t-shirt that said “thepresenthistory.blogspot.com,” people would think me a pompous ass, full of pretentious notions of myself as “a writer.” But if I got a quill and inkpot tattooed on the inside of my forearm, then I would be an intellectual.