My Modern Tattoo
It’s certainly hard to look real rebellious and intimidating these days, when college students destined for quiet suburban lives have body piercings and tattoos. Even the well-behaved businessmen got inked and wear earrings.
Tattoos have been used for centuries to reflect changes in life status, whether passage into adulthood or induction into a group like the military or a gang. In recent years, tattoos have also become a fashion accessory, a trend fueled by basketball players, bands and celebrities.
Tattoos, once were the bold violation of flesh and society view, are becoming a sexy and popular trend. With over 1,400 licensed tattoo artists in New York City, tattoos are probably better and safer now than they’ve ever been — more creative and varied, applied in many cases by serious, highly skilled body artists.
Then again, there are tattoos, and there are tattoos. It is unlikely that the ambitious professional with a single, understated, discreetly placed and wittily conceived tat, or for that matter the teenager with her boyfriend’s name and two lovebirds emblazoned in the small of her back, will ever have tattoos on the face and scalp, or a full chest or back “panel” or a tattooed arm or leg.
Who in the world gets a neck tattoo? A couple of years back you could have narrowed the answer to gang members, prison inmates, members of the Russian mob and the rapper Lil Wayne. Then something occurred.
Some tattoo aficionados, though, have transformed large portions of their bodies into multicolored canvases for all manner of skulls, serpents, raptors, flame-breathing dragons, flowers, vines, angels, demons, daggers, buxom bombshells and portraits of heroes and loved ones.
A report by the Food and Drug Administration estimated that as many as 45 million Americans have tattoos. The report based the number on the finding by a Harris Interactive Poll in 2003 that 16 percent of all adults and 36 percent of people 25 to 29 had at least one tattoo. The poll also found that 17 percent of tattooed Americans regretted it. And a tattoo that cost several hundred dollars could require several thousand dollars and many laser sessions to remove
