![]() Other people are trying to unveil their wild side. They don’t always work out - on the reality show “Miami Ink” a woman tried to have her “I will succeed thru Him” tattoo altered after she grew sick of religion - but the longing for permanence is admirable. In a world of pixelated flux, these tattoos are expressions of commitment - a way to say that as long as I live, this thing will matter to me. So some people will have their kids’ faces tattooed across their backs, or the motorcycle that belonged to a now-dead friend, or a fraternity, brigade or company logo. Canvas tattoos are means of artistic expression. Record Book tattoos commemorate the rites of passage in a life. In a forthcoming essay in The American Interest, David Kirby observes that there are essentially two types of tattoo narratives, the Record Book and the Canvas. The only person without one of those Pacific Northwest Indian tribal graphics scrawled across his shoulder will be a lone 13-year-old skater scoffing at all the bourgeois tattoo fogies. Everybody else will be decorated with gothic-lettered AARP logos and Katie Couric 4-EVER tributes, and Democrats will have their Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers scratched across their backs so even their morticians will know which way they voted. Pretty soon you’ll go to the beach and find that only the most hardened nonconformists will be unmarked. Thirty-six percent of those between 18 and 29 have a tattoo. There are so many spider webs, dolphins, Celtic motifs and yin-yang images spread across the sands, it looks like a New Age symbology conference with love handles.Ī study in The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology showed that about 24 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 50 have at least one tattoo, up from about 15 percent in 2003. We have to assume that any casual antitattoo remark will cause offense, even to those we least suspect of self-marking.Įverybody who has been to the beach this summer has observed that tattoos are now everywhere. ![]() Whether we are at a formal dinner, at a professional luncheon, at a sales conference or arguing before the Supreme Court, we have to assume that everyone in the room is fully tatted up - that under each suit, dress or blouse, there is at least a set of angel wings, a barbed wire armband, a Chinese character or maybe even a fully inked body suit. We now have to work under the assumption that every American has a tattoo.
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