No doubt, there is a trend today toward tenuous torrents of teeming tatts. Everywhere you turn there are more and more gallons of ink embedded more or less permanently in more and more hectares of human skin. Arms, legs, lower backs, upper backs, necks, faces and even (apparently) other less visible human body parts are being covered in tattoos faster than you can say “Are you nuts?”
At the risk of sounding old fashioned, out of touch and completely reasonable, let me just say I’m not a huge fan of so-called “body art”. I think skin on its own, in any given color is just fine. In fact, I cringe just a little whenever I see an attractive young lady with an arm covered with permanent engravings of roses and snakes and – is that that horrible creature from the movie “Alien” on your shoulder?? And I cringe a whole lot more when a person of larger stature bends over too far and the entire world is presented with a tattoo tramp stamp that is, shall we say, far too cheeky.
As someone once remarked: when my grandmother was around she had to take my mother to the circus if they wanted to see a Fat Lady and a Tattooed Man - now they’re everywhere!
OK – full disclosure. I must admit, I got a tattoo a while back. Quite a while back. It was a rather blurry image of Huckleberry Hound, one of my favorite cartoon characters, and it was on the back of my hand. It came out of a Bazooka gum package and it was a sticker that I applied with a little water. (They were all the rage in Grade 3 at South School.) I wore that colorful blob for upwards of a whole week, so I feel when it comes to tattoos, I know whereof I speak.
Thing is, mine wore off, thank goodness, but all those ink addicted tattoo-toatlers out there – well, you’re basically hooped.
Which non-tattoo person has not asked the question: “So what are you going to do when that impressive flying dragon tattoo eventually looks like it has crash landed in a blotchy swamp of grey muck when you get all old and droopy?”
As Robin Williams once said: “You get a tattoo of barbed wire at age 18 but by the time you’re 80 it’s a picket fence”.
Or this from Dolly Parton: “I met a girl the other day and the nicest thing I can say about her is that all her tattoos are spelled correctly.” And perhaps comedian Richard Jeni sums it up succinctly: “I see a woman with a tattoo and I’m thinking – here’s a gal who is capable of making a decision she’ll regret in the future.”
It’s becoming clear that the business to be in a decade or two from now is tattoo removal. It’s already pretty lucrative, but can you image how much money will be made from throngs of tatt people who finally realize they aren’t as super cool as they once thought they were. And isn’t it time to remove that “Never Don’t Give Up” tattoo you have on your forehead?
Now most of us don’t mind a tiny little flower on an ankle or a small heart on the inside of a wrist, and – hey – who’s to say what anyone else should or shouldn’t do with their own bodies? I get that. But I also get what Victoria Jackson from Saturday Night Live once remarked: “I don’t have any tattoos or piercings yet, but I do have a cold sore I’ve been ignoring.”
Harley Hay is a Red Deer writer and filmmaker.