Tattoos Now and Then
According to PEW (Pew Research Center)38% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 are tattooed. My nurse daughter is in that age group and she has a variety of tattoos. Currently she has the inked outlines of a hollowed out sleeve tattoo. Which will be filled in at a later date so I have been told. To me, the smallish tattoo behind her ear is …well a tiny monopoly house. She claims it is something else. I know not what. She also alleges she has ‘tats” elsewhere which I neither need or want to see.
I just listened to a program on NPR whereby the deceased are willing to give/donate/thrust upon relatives their once-upon-a-time their real alive tattoos after the tattooee goes to the great tattoo parlor in the sky. My first reaction was well…..um…. Yucky!
My second reaction was how the heck does one do that? I also recalled a few very sick Nazis kept the tattoos of deceased concentration camp victims. That puts a warble or two in my stomach to be honest and makes it difficult for me to separate the willful donating of tattoos vs the collecting of them from the unwilling. I know they are different but again for me the squirm-factor is there.
So how does one get and preserve a tattoo from a deceased person? At the moment Amsterdam is the place to do it. In a lab, pathologists will remove water and fat from the skin and substitute it with a type of plasticine. Four inches of saved tattoo costs about $400.
Each generation has their own fad thingie they succumb to. My generation’s fads included long hair, flannel shirts, and blue jeans of various sorts – bell bottoms being one example. I also remember spending a very long time fraying the bottom of my jeans so they looked cool and not new. I will add in my generations’ defense. Hair can be cut (or lost) Jeans can be traded in for pleated pants, and flannel shirts can be exchanged for schnazzy button down prim and proper white collared shirts. But tattoos are forever. In my mind’s eye I can see the current generation many generations hence in wheel chairs hiding or sharing with their enfeebled neighbors their faded, dullened, skin merged and expanded tattoos. They will have a lot of explaining to do. Hopefully their hearing aids and thick glasses will serve them well with the tellings.
There is a part of me which feels that these kids of today haven’t really earned their tats. I mean were they front line in-a-fox-hole marines? Nope! Many of their tats are of favorite bands , food, a graduation date, or a zip code. (Really? a zip code.) Like they can’t remember where they live. What if they move? I recall the mom of one of my students had tats of her current male companion. The only problem was her companionship changed, but the tats remained.
Confession, I have a tattoo. But I feel I have earned mine. It’s on my right ankle. Put there 44 years ago by a famous tattooist (Petelo Petelo) when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in South Pacific’s Samoa. It was an ordeal and a joining of a cultural tradition. My tattoo was hammered in my skin with a shark-toothed hand held small rake-like contraption. Regular ink and lamp black (charcoal) were mixed together on a banana leaf then pounded into me. Villagers sang as it was being done. It took 45 minutes and toward the end I turned pale and was ready to barf. However my gut held. I feel I earned my tattoo. It also happens to look 44 years old. It has dulled. The clear lines have faded, spread out and merged . Kind of a big blurr. Truth be told I wandered into a local tattoo shop recently and asked if it could be cleaned up and brought back to life. The female tattooist was impressed with the age of my tattoo but she said, “I can’t fix it. Sorry.”
I asked, “If you could fix it what would it cost?”
“I can’t but if I could it would be $700.”
Wow, I thought. It cost me two full quarts of Vailima beer to get it done.
At any rate, apparently my tattoo will go with me when I go to the big tattoo parlor in the sky. I don’t think my daughter wants it.