500 words on Tattoos

Is there supposed to be a crucifix hanging on the wall? Is carpeting a good idea in this kind of place? The table that I was laying prone on appeared to be from a doctor’s office, before I was born, and well used. The building appeared to be a roadside house, but it came highly recommended. I am sure this is a good idea. Gary learned and mastered the trade in the gritty but artistic San Francisco tattoo scene.

For millennia, man has been altering his flesh with ink. The tattoos of the Polynesian and Pacific people encountered by Western explorers in the 1700s may have engrained the art into our modern culture, but tribes and cultures bearing tattoos span the globe and the centuries. From the Germanic and Celtic cultures of Europe before Christianity spread across the continent to the Paleolithic era of Japan 10,000 years back.

After years of wanting, and months deciding where to place it, I was finally getting a tattoo. On a Christmas trip to Portland, to visit my brother and his family, was when the final decisions were made. My brother and I were getting matching tattoos. More permanent than last names and resemblance, we sought a simple, affordable design that spoke to our family, heritage, and faith. For us this was one of our greater and richer moments and every day I am reminded, with warmth in heart, of what lead to the Celtic cross on my leg.

But tattoos have a dark history. They have not always adorned the flesh as tributes and honors, or been picked from a board during an alcohol-lathered trip to South Padre Island. They been used to label property and shame military deserters. Without regard to the Jewish prohibition on tattoos, the Nazis used tattoos to identify and track prisoners of the concentration camps, perhaps the most tragic victims of subdermal ink.

On my back, with the needle pressing into my skin and the art taking shape with each minute, the pain shifted. I’d read of the euphoria that take over when the human body is pushed, in pain or sport or ecstasy. The high that came with the tattoo made the colors richer, the sounds deeper, and the stories more sane. Like the strangest tattoo, when Gary “scaled” a man’s balls before his religious conversion. Under the spell of the tattoo needle, the crucifix and funky carpeting in the lobby seem perfect.

Recent surveys demonstrate the revival and prevalence of tattoos. A 2008 survey by Harris Interactive estimates that about 15% of all Americans have at least on tattoos. Recent surveys by the Pew Research Center and the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology found that more than 30% of young people, men and women under 35, have tattoos.

Regardless of the wishes of those drunken teenagers in South Padre Island – and likely their parents – tattoos aren’t going anywhere. Few trends among mankind have the permanence of tattoo, despite the best efforts of Dr. Tattoff.