Tit for Tat

What’s with all this tattooing? I used to think that the only people who got tattoos were drunken sailors on leave in Hong Kong, who got really unskilled tats and regretted waking up the next morning from out on a toot and were very sorry that they had done it.

I belong to an athletic club and I am truly shocked to see some women in the dressing room showing off some really awful tats.  One woman, who would otherwise be rather attractive, has complicated tats of   

vines and leaves with little animals hidden among the greenery from the top of her arms down to her wrists. And that is it.

Mind you I can understand a woman wanting to get some discrete little graphic on a place where no one would see it except for her doctor and an intimate partner, but some of these woman show off tats that practically cover their body except from their heads and hands.  I somehow, thankfully, did not receive that gene in my DNA, which wants to get my body permanently painted.  And if, by chance I did get that gene I would pick out a really good artist to do the work, not some untrained “tattooist” who is just learning the trade, as so many of these people seem to have.

As a kid growing up the only woman who had tattoos was the one featured at the side show at a carnival.  It was a true oddity and people paid money to see her.  Now it is for free in any female locker room and sometimes in any restaurant on a hot day being served by a tattooed waitress with a tattoo of a huge eagle trying desperately to crawl out of her bra.

I wonder if it is some kind of masochistic reward to have an electric needle hammering away on my skin, shooting up colors.  Maybe it is the process rather than the result which people are after. The designs being the reward for agony, perhaps like the Mori people of New Zealand as part of a coming of age ceremony.  I do not think tattoos on North Americans are trendy cool or sexy.  I sort of rate the a kind of “in your face, look at me” kind of action.