Tattoos!

I was recently asked about my thoughts on tattoos, and I've been thinking about it a lot today. If you think about it, tattooing yourself is a very strange ritual. Injecting ink into yourself to form permanent pictures under your skin sounds like a kind of drastic and painful step to take without serious cause, but it has become a fairly routine act.

 For some people it is a "rebellion," but I realized last night that getting a tattoo as a form of rebellion is really a kind of method of conforming. Instead of rebelling with a crazy, socially unacceptable extreme, getting a tattoo is a generally accepted (if not necessarily approved of) method of rebellion that is common and is widely recognized as a method of mild rebellion. It gets the message across without ostracizing the bearer or cutting him or her off from most sectors of society. Most people, particularly females, don't go out on too much of a limb when they get a tattoo, placing it in a discreet area of their body or getting a relatively inoffensive image or phrase. I'm a pretty good example of this. My original reason for wanting a tattoo was to prove to my parents (and the world) that I am going to do "whatever the fuck I want" with my life, including alterations to my body and appearance. But my tattoo is in the center of my back, where it is extremely coverable, and is of a completely inoffensive image.

           my first tattoo in the first week after I got it

So do we have to have better reasons to get tattoos? I guess the answer to this is no. Nobody has to have a particularly "good" or "meaningful" reason to get a tattoo. Anyone can just think "Hey, I think that a tattoo of a big cat jumping out of my bicep would be pretty fuckin' awesome," and that is just as legitimate of a reason for tattooing ones' self as wanting the name of a dead loved one, or a symbol of one's faith borne on their skin. It's not really my idea of grand reasoning, and I personally am not a big fan of what seem to be arbitrary images for tattoos, but I also acknowledge that it is very difficult to tell what tattoos really mean something and what don't. Maybe the red neck in Walmart has a jaguar ripping out of his arm because it means something to him, or maybe he just thinks it looks cool. I'm not sure that it really makes a difference.

Getting a tattoo totally repulses some people, which I find interesting, because I am absolutely fascinated by tattooing. The tattoo on my back feels very much like it belongs there, and has been there forever, even though I only got it about 6 months ago. I plan on getting a second one when I come back to school in the fall, and would like a couple more after that before I am (probably) done with my own skin. I find deep personal satisfaction in having the tattoo that I got last fall, and I look forward to getting others.

Oddly, in a manner similar to how some people are turned off by tattoos, piercings are a little bit of a conundrum for me. Unorthodox piercings (which by the way are a far truer form of rebellion than most tattoos are, in my opinion) kind of freak me out to be honest. Like corset piercings, or genital piercings. Even getting a cartilage piercing in my ear was a much more difficult and far edgier decision for me than getting a tattoo. I have a hard time wrapping my head around them, but in the end I guess the most important thing is that we aren't afraid to express ourselves through our bodies, whether that means getting tattooed, or pierced, or keeping our bodies free of modifications. That means that even though someone might have a 15 piercings in his or her face and a bunch more in places I can't see, I'm going to try not to jump to the conclusion that he or she shouldn't be teaching my kids someday, or nursing me in a hospital, or inventing vaccines, because body modification shouldn't be used as an indicator of limited intelligence, or incompetence, or untrustworthiness.

Just something I've been thinking over lately.