The blog post by Vox Day I linked below made me think it would be a good idea to have a thread to discuss tattoos. He does probably the best job I've ever seen of summarizing the significance of tattoos and the various reasons why people get them.
I'm in my fifties now and given that it seems like most Americans younger than me have at least a few at this point, I realize that some of you guys have them. It is what it is. I'm not sure how prevalent they are in other countries. I went back to my wife's country in Latin America last year to visit and they seemed fairly mainstream there too, whereas up to ten years or so ago it was just assumed that only gangsters had them, to the point that the cops would often just arrest a guy with tattoos on sight on the assumption that he was some sort of criminal.
Back in the 1980s when I was in high school in the US having any tattoos at all was unusual, even one small one. Full sleeves or having a large percentage of your body covered in them was a rarity and considered very extreme, probably only something someone in a biker gang or some kind of sailor or someone like that would do. Tattoos on the neck or face were unheard of and would have been universally considered a sign of mental illness. The prevalence of tattoos nowadays and the way they're considered completely normal and even mundane is one of those strange night-and-day changes I've witnessed in the course of my own lifetime, in some ways similar to how the US went from being a white, Anglo-Saxon country in my youth to the multicultural, atomized Tower of Babel it is now.
Anyway, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on tattoos.
I'm in my fifties now and given that it seems like most Americans younger than me have at least a few at this point, I realize that some of you guys have them. It is what it is. I'm not sure how prevalent they are in other countries. I went back to my wife's country in Latin America last year to visit and they seemed fairly mainstream there too, whereas up to ten years or so ago it was just assumed that only gangsters had them, to the point that the cops would often just arrest a guy with tattoos on sight on the assumption that he was some sort of criminal.
Back in the 1980s when I was in high school in the US having any tattoos at all was unusual, even one small one. Full sleeves or having a large percentage of your body covered in them was a rarity and considered very extreme, probably only something someone in a biker gang or some kind of sailor or someone like that would do. Tattoos on the neck or face were unheard of and would have been universally considered a sign of mental illness. The prevalence of tattoos nowadays and the way they're considered completely normal and even mundane is one of those strange night-and-day changes I've witnessed in the course of my own lifetime, in some ways similar to how the US went from being a white, Anglo-Saxon country in my youth to the multicultural, atomized Tower of Babel it is now.
Anyway, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on tattoos.