Dear Tattoo, So Cute But You’re Bringing Everyone Into Disrepute
Did you hear about the guy with the misspelled tattoo? He says he has ‘No regerts’.
— Tat anonymous saying!
I have been thinking of redoing my tattoos and getting more of them but I feel a sense of hesitation, partly due to my laziness and mostly because of an inevitable circumstance.
A long time ago, when I planned to and had had my first tattoos, it was all about rebellion, screaming our dissenting thought aloud to whomsoever it may concern, defying the authority and making statements about individuality and freedom. Now it seems every little jackass wants to have a piece of the little needling action. And all because everybody is doing it. And I rigorously follow Bukowski in this regard: ‘Wherever the crowd goes, run in the other direction. They’re always wrong.’
Sample some of these tattoos from today’s hardcore jackasses:
‘I’m a mess, I confess.’ Even the rhyme and grammatically correct usage of a comma cannot help but glaringly tells the ridiculousness. ‘Never give up’ in a cursive font with a meaningless ellipsis and a heart sign that yells you ought to do away with the superfluous combination of words and symbols… and a ‘no man is an island’ tattoo, all in small letters to signify he is really not an island, but with ‘small’ significance, he lives alone? Oh, dear tattoo, thy name is modification.
Back in the primitive days of my life, I had seen anchor tattoos but not again with sentimental-bullshit heart shapes or phony phrases.
I said primitive because in those days, we started with — to get inked permanently — carbon rods from dry cells to make paste for the monochromatic rifle-green colour and needles, like big, fat sack needles, to tattoo. That was how everybody did it. And I grew up seeing a lot of well-designed anchor tattoos not only on Popeye the Sailor’s arm but also among the grownups in my neighbourhood.
Some of the other familiar designs included those of skull and crossbones, scorpions and dragons and all of them were bold and captivating to say the last, unlike ‘I’m a mess, I confess’. First, mostly the junkies got the tattoos, we were told that they were and strictly advised to avoid them or anything that had to do with them. It was no less than a taboo to get a tattoo but that was the cool part.
Then, came a certain period in our high school days, when the police and military personnel as always in the town, were rounding up people. Apparently, in those days as a trend, many guys in proscribed organisations were allegedly getting inked with some particular designs. The authority came up with the unique plan to separate the armed rebels from the civilians: if you have a tattoo, we beat you and send you to jail-oo. (They might as well force you to cough up but mentioning it will be against the secret rhyme of the establishment).
In the aftermath, we saw many civilians rushing to clinics and the less fortunate others, using literally red-hot knives and removing their tattoos manually. That did not encourage us to get the tattoos but neither had it deterred us and looking back it was sheer audacity that we could not from today’s jackasses who have tears streaming down their faces when they got their love-anchor tattoos.
That was in the late Nineties and stupid teenagers that we were, we got into the act immediately. Making a tattoo was not a private moment between the tattooer and the tattooed. Besides the two of them, there would be one more person making the paste and another working on some shitty sketches and drafts as, leave alone computers, design printouts were no less than a time-machine stuff, and more of us would be hanging around just to watch the ritual. Quite a community-bonding bit!
It was stupid of course but we were still saying no to authority and conformity. Meanwhile, we were also undergoing an evolutionary process on the art of tattooing. A few years later, we got rid of carbon rods and sack needles and switched to fabric colours that gave us relatively more choices for the shades and insulin syringes that offered more pixel points and thus clarity. The procedure for inking remained the same and so were our dislike for the ordinary, the routines and the rules.
Read On Telling the Tales of Tattoos, Kapil Arambam
Looking at the World’s Tattoos, Smithsonian.com
How Tattoos Went From Subculture to Pop Culture, HuffPost
Further, the 2000s brought the proper tattoo machines. Whenever our holier-than-thou-family-and-not-so-friendly elders got any chance, they would lambast us for trying to be unique like everybody else, wearing similar sneakers and clothes though not before they picked apart every piece of our lives. That was like their hobby: to take us to task and ours was to stick to the angsty My-Life-My-Rules code. But the point is, in those days with all the tattoo things, they must have seen distinctly how so senseless we were — with the currents of the time, with the stuffs that we were using and basically, to their eyes, in the whole charade. But never mind.
Two decades into the millennium, the bombardment of cocky faces, cheesy expressions, phony phrases that are full of nothingness on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram timelines, the barrage of all-time superficial pop music videos and images and the rise of celebrity culture and pretentious social-media influencers have ruined the significance.
Notwithstanding the realisation and maturity by virtue of the passing moons, seasons and suns, getting a tattoo can still be an act of defiance albeit the normalisation has made it uninteresting. I should just redo them, get more of them, and leave the You-Think-It-I-Ink-It jackasses to their own (tattoo) devices.
