Ode To Self 4

"I don't have a tattoo. I've already got a personality." Those were the words of a stand-up comedian I heard on the radio some time ago. I couldn't agree more. There was a time when, like almost everyone else, I found tattoos threatening, sinister, representative of the dark side of life. Only prisoners, drug dealers, thugs, prostitutes (remember the Tramp Stamp?)diesel dykes, and rock musicians wore them. This all began to change in the eighties. Then, in the nineties, Gen X caught on and the tattoo became a requisite fashion statement. Tattoo parlours have opened everywhere, competing with pot shops and yoga studios for space. It is said that at least twenty-five percent of people under fifty now wear tattoos. Almost everywhere they are displayed with insouciance. Even bank employees, female as well as male, can be seen showing inked skin. Back in `95 when all trashy skin art was exploding onto the scene I even considered going into partnership with a young man who wanted me to design tattoos for his clientele. I'm glad I never took the bait. A few years later, a Christian gal I was friends with asked me if I thought it would be okay for her to get a tattoo, or WGA (Would God Approve?) I replied that to me it was a matter completely between her and her maker and my friendship would not be contingent on a bit of ink showing under her skin. So far so good. But then I said the deal breaker. I asked her how much it would cost (this woman was not poor.) She replied somewhere in the neighbourhood of one hundred and something. Speaking Christian to Christian I ventured to suggest that maybe the money could be better spent, perhaps on feeding the homeless or being donated to the food bank or, fill in the blank. I suppose this could be why, a year later, when I came out in favour of same sex marriage she dropped me like the proverbial hot potato. Tattoos, by becoming mainstream, have completely lost their rebel chic. They are now every bit as commonplace, mundane and bourgeois as running shoes. And they are still every bit as ugly as they've ever been. They do not beautify the human skin, but make otherwise lovely young people gleaming with health and vitality look like biodegradable back alley walls tagged and scrawled with the most hideous and garish graffiti. The fashion trend of tattoos was inevitable, however. They are a kind of socially sanctioned self-mutilation. A desolate cry of desperate young individuals who do not feel like individuals. They don't know who they are, nor if they even have a soul. Getting significant images inked permanently under the skin gives them an identity, and this they will find in a way empowering. But how sad. We live in this culture of greed and mindless consumerism that reduces the individual into an economic cipher. We are, by living in this place and time, divested of our soul, our individuality, our humanity. So, some of us ink ourselves and this shows ourselves and the world that we are somebody and finally we begin to feel a little bit special. This is how we cope with the trauma of consumerism. We rebel and turn ourselves into human murals in order to declare our existence. We ink into visibility the collective trauma of this dark time we are all living in together. And we still remain powerless. Only now we don't know it.