Tattoo You

I've looked at tattoos and thought: “Man, that is a cool tattoo.” Or – to use hipster parlance – a cool tat. Look at the way that snake coils along dude's arm, and when he flexes the bicep, you just know it's swallowing a hamster. It looks so right, that tat, on that particular arm, on that particular guy. On a different guy, it would look wrong.

And folks, I hate to break the news, but most of us just aren't right for the tattoo of the snake, or even of the hamster. This is the problem. The masses have confused an ancient form of spiritual self-expression with a new and permanent form of pop art. How many bumper stickers have I replaced? How many refrigerator magnets have I tossed out during a move? How much thought goes into the average person's choice of tattoo?

I hasten to acknowledge that tattoos can be fabulous. I know lots of people with some wicked-cool body art. I'm in awe of a lot of it. A woman I know has a Sanskrit character on her shoulder blade she got back when she drove a Harley to Burning Man. It bears repeating… when she drove a Harley to Burning Man: Ergo, she's the “type.”  A guy I know is the lead singer in a band and got great work done to his arms. It bears repeating… is the lead singer in a band: Ergo, he's the “type.”

What happens when alternative-leaning coeds contemplate the lifetime alteration of their skin? I can only imagine.

“I'm going to do it.”

“Excellent. What are you having done?”

“The butterfly. There's this really cool one at Bleep Tattoo, and you get to pick a color scheme, and I'm choosing blue and yellow because, like, I'm pretty sure that psychic was right about my aura being yellow, and cornflower blue is my favorite color.”

“Are you sure?”

“Definitely. The tattoo guy said butterflies carry the spirits of the beautiful dead to the Afterlife, and I'm, like, really beautiful and will be dead at some point – hopefully when I'm like really old and less beautiful, so it totally fits my soul path.”

“That is so right.”

“What are you getting?”

“A ladybug.”

“Aw, that is so sweet. Where?”

“My right hip, like right below where my thong hits. Just a little one. It'll be cute to see if my boyfriend tries to flick it off.”

“Be careful. A goth girl I heard about had a tick tat…”

“A what?”

“A tick tattooed on her thigh, and it was so real, her dude tried to burn it off with his lighter.”

“What a dick.”

“Seriously.”

Speaking of seriously, prison tattoos are serious business. As a lawyer, I've seen the greatest tattoos of Knoxville. Most of them don't make good material for a humor column. They're either sad – such as the teardrop tattoo – or scary, like the skull with a snake slithering through a broken eye socket.

But the most common – and bewildering (to me, anyway) – jailhouse tattoo is finger lettering. Each finger of each hand sports a letter spelling out the word “love” on one hand, and “fuck” on the other. Love and fuck: the ultimate duality, the Yin and Yang of human sexual attraction.

You may be the Yin-them-and-leave-them type, or the world's greatest Yanger. You may be conflicted over your need for a variety of good Yangs, but your yearning for true Yin. You may be lucky enough to be in Yin with somebody who can really Yang like nobody's business. It's all part of the duality of life, spelled out in gunmetal gray, tortured calligraphy with the help of a fine-edged shank.

Many years ago, a young skinhead came to court with “I Hate Jews” tattooed across his forehead. His lawyer delayed his court date and ordered him to grow enough hair to form bangs across his brow in the meantime. The lawyer upbraided him for his indecency, hatred and disrespect. The young man said, “Man, you're really judgmental.”

In whatever dark corners lurk the tattoo artists who engrave prisoners and social misfits with lurid and sometimes chilling emblems, however, there is no real money. Ironically, what they're doing – grotesque and disturbing as it may be – is actually more in line with the more ancient purpose of tattooing: to signal an identity that exists in the margins of society, or outside of it altogether.

Until now! If you're not cool enough to actually drop out of society and live independent of its false constructs, you can just pretend to by hopping on a chair and picking out your very own individualized scar. Pay the premium rate, too. I mean, don't discount your flesh. If you're going to buy a tattoo, splurge on it. We live in an era in which women carrying Dolce and Gabbana handbags point at their tats and say, “That one cost over five hundred dollars. But in Miami, it would have been triple that.”

Better still, as popular as tattoos have become, it's just possible that the surest way to be an outsider is by not getting one at all.

“You don't have a tattoo?”

“No.”

“Not anywhere?”

“No.”

“So, when you bend over in your low-riders, all anybody can really see is your crack?”

“That's pretty much it.”

“Not even a tiny starfish?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Wow. That's rad.”

“I know. I'm thinking of living off the grid some day.”

A few years ago, I accompanied a friend of mine, who was really into body art and wanted to get a second tattoo, to a tattoo parlor. (I know they don't really call them parlors any more – I can only imagine it's because “parlor” signifies the earlier, non-commercial focus on body art.) Anyway, I was looking around the shop and noticed something that made me smile for days. It was so special. At that “tattoo specialist's” shop, you could get your sorority letters engraved anywhere on your body.

Ain't that America?