Arts & Culture
Needled to Death: The Ubiquity of Tattoos Kills Their Deeper Meaning
In October of 2008, Gawker ran a quick take on a Wall Street Journal report that detailed the coming of mall-based tattoo parlors. The trend, says the Journal, was aimed “to capture more of the growing market of young people” who’d like to, presumably, plunk down 60 bucks for a butterfly on their ankle. “This is happening in Vegas, Beverly Hills, Staten Island, and Jersey,” flipped Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan. “I guess they deserve it.”
And maybe they do. But lost in the stultifying questions of relative edginess that make Nolan’s kicker — and permeate the Journal’s poor effort — is the fact that this guy might be coming to a mall near you not just because the stigma that’s been attached to ink for say, three-hundred years, has kind of disappeared (though that’s certainly true). Nope: The real reason that Hot Topic may soon find itself printing up hundreds of permission slips is the same one that finds Twitter thinking that it will eventually become the first Internet application to boast a billion users. Which is to say that, just over two decades into the existence of the World Wide Web, we have become totally convinced that everyone else cares about what we say, think, and do. However insignificant that may be.
This all fits with the history of tattoos — at least according to the Smithsonian’s Cate Lineberry, who notes in this 2007 article that “the Greek writer Herodotus … stated that amongst the Scythians and Thracians ‘tattoos were a mark of nobility, and not to have them was testimony of low birth.’” So back in 450 A.D., the things were, for ancient Siberians, a status symbol, a way of telling their world exactly who they were. This of course would have been significant — and would seem (in a world of universally graded significance) to be the diametric opposite of, say, Jessica Alba’s tramp stamp.
But there is no universal scale on which we could weigh the skin-and-ink statements of Alba and Anacharsis the Scythian. (Really, that bow right above her crack might be just as important to her as any symbols of life rank that any ancient duder might have scrawled down his or her bicep.) So, lucky for us, we have the Internets: Could Anacharsis have crunched his philosophy and identity into 140 character segments to be digested every 45 minutes or so? Technology aside, he probably could have. But the resources of his time made the presentation of the written word into something of a precious task. So far removed from any such appreciation for print, our world is freed from the pressure to keep every little scrawling as a sacred contribution to knowledge — which is probably appropriate. As a side-effect, every tattoo idea becomes an acceptable form of communication.
And so we prattle on. Tweets. Facebook status updates. Bloggish thingies. And tattoos. Tons of em. All minor statements of identity which, just two decades ago, would never have seen the light of day. Our assumption — confirmed by our fittingly-entitled Followers? That the greater world really cares about what you made for dinner. Celebrity. Democratized.
Not that the proliferation of fragmented ideas that comes along thanks to all of this is necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, our now-steady jabbering probably goes a long way toward bringing us all more informationally (if not intellectually) closer. That we can never hope to have the same impact on humanity that our more deliberate forebears could boast is the price we pay — with or without the edginess.
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