Tattoos... I’d like to study their history. Knowing nothing at all about them, but having seen them marking peoples from all kinds of cultures and times, and having one myself, I would venture to say that they are used, in all kinds of tribes, even these days when they are ubiquitous and seem to be aquired on a whim, as part of a ritual to mark some kind of passage, to mark an occasion, and to solidify a bond with another or others.
In these times of economic uncertainty, my friend Carlyn has been photographing images which she has classified as “economic indicators”. NPR, in its mission to paint a picture of the national landscape, has also been putting out small stories, or if you will, giving us snippets of news that, because of Carly, I have come to think of as “narrative economic indicators”. One such story today was not about the demise of one business or another, but about a business that is flourishing in these times of economic hardship, and that’s the tattoo removal business: the business that removes the markings of a passage, an occasion and/or the solidification of a bond with another. And the most often removed tattoo category is the name of a loved one.
Now for the rant: given the time and space we live in, and given the rate of divorce in this here time and space, what kind of IQ does it take to inject the name of another person into several layers of one’s skin!
Now for a corollary rant: Having gone and done that, people, you should own up to your tattoos and leave the damn things intact; just start a damn list of names. It will be a reminder that life can’t be so easily erased!
this is a delayed reaction but waaaaaait a minute how come i didn't know you had a tattoo too???
ReplyDelete(I agree, I'm just a pussy, and my tat is very, very large)
You didn't?!!! And you're no pussy--- shit the laser treatment is worse than the tattoo--- and thus history can't be erased all that painlessly after all (-;
ReplyDeleteaddendum:
ReplyDeleteReally, I never told you about my tattoo?! Ever?!
There was this store called Freedom in São Paulo, Brazil, owned by this British dude called Clive. The store sold beads and things (and probably very good drugs in the back room. It was the 70’s and things looked a lot like they do now. Clive had these incredible tattoos all over his body when not many people had tattoos, unlike now. When my friend Suzy and I used to go there to buy trinkets, we would ask him about his tattoos. I remember this incredibly beautiful sailboat on his thigh... It was a picture of the boat with which he used to sail around the world (that kind of money did not come from selling beads to sixteen year olds). He told us his tattoos had been all done by his brother Jimmy, who lived in Liverpool. Suzy and I didn’t think about it again until 1979 when Jimmy was visiting Brazil at the same time I was back there for vacation. By that time, Clive had opened this hip bar called “The Victoria”. It was the 80’s: time for other kinds of “freedom”. Suzy and I kept going there every night looking for Jimmy, who showed up one night in a flowing white linen suit holding a glass of Champaign. Jimmy had been merchant marine or plain navy (not sure), he did not have a very refined British accent, had only “hand carved” tattoos around his wrists that he had gotten when he was enlisted, had a beautiful girlfriend for an assistant, and gave us all business cards that said “Jimmy: Tattoo Artist. If you’ve had sex today, smile.”. Jimmy was a walking contradiction. He had his equipment with him and agreed to tattoo us. Suzy and I had no idea what we wanted as images, so he chose: a rose for me and a butterfly for her. He also decided where they were going to go: on our “upper legs” so that, in his words, “you can hide them when you want to.”
So that’s the story of my tattoo. I took the picture after sitting on it for a few hours reading Art Forum--- appropriate, no? I like the fact that it is all deformed from sitting and that the fabric from my shorts is pressed into the skin--- I was going for the “flesh-ness” (disgusting as that can strike me sometimes) of it all...