By
Tobin Barnes
Sorry,
I don’t get tattoos…as in, I don’t understand them and so I don’t have any. Never
have, never will.
Go ahead, call me an
old fogey. I can take it.
Just like with soccer,
my generation was never much into tattoos. To us, they were exotic things we’d
occasionally see as kids on the arms of WWII Navy veterans and at freak shows.
For us baby boomers
growing up in the 50s and 60s, many of the adult males in our lives were war
vets, some of whom had probably served intensely in battle, while the rest had
done their bit well back of the front lines.
Unfortunately, we didn’t
think much about their service at the time. Most vets didn’t talk about it. Only
later did we appreciate being hollered at by people who had grown up during a
depression and gone on to win a world war.
About the only evidence
of all this, as far as we could tell, were adults who we thought were pretty
tight with a buck, some World War II movies, and the random tattoo on a hairy
arm.
As for the tattoos, the
usual story was that the guy was drunk one night in port when he was pressured
into having one done.
Even then, I didn’t
understand tattoos. Other than the anchors on Popeye, most “body art” that I
saw were just navy blue smudges on some guy’s forearm or biceps. It was almost
always tough to tell what the original picture or inscription had been. Time
had done a number on them.
I don’t know, maybe the
World War II tattoo “artists” or techniques weren’t as good then as they are
now—isn’t a needle still a needle?—but who would want a smudge on your arm that
no one could make out?
It all didn’t seem to
hold much attraction for the baby boomers that I grew up with, not even for those
of us who became hippies. Of course, they’d draw things on their bodies, too,
but they could always wash them off the next day.
And all this held true,
until a few of us boomers became bikers, then it was Katy bar the door for
those types.
But I still don’t get
it.
I’ve never seen a
drawing or picture of anything, dazzling as my first impression of it might
have been—some great piece of art, maybe—that I’d want to have on my body for
the rest of my life, let alone a skull, a snake, or a butterfly.
Even the most intense
infatuations eventually fade away to “Ho hum, what’s next?” That’s why it’s so
easy to change the screen saver on your computer. Whatever picture you had on
there that you once thought was so neat, it’s not long before you get tired of
it, if not sick of it. It’s always time for something new for human beings.
Most pictures you have
up in your house, you stopped looking at them long ago. Even if you had the
Mona Lisa on your living room wall, you wouldn’t notice it after a few weeks.
And all that doesn’t
even take into account sagging. Everybody’s skin sags. Man, look at me—have I
ever sagged. Past forty, everything starts to droop, especially the things that
don’t look so good when they droop. You start looking like a construction of bean
bags with a lot of the beans missing.
So what’s it going to
look like when the younger generation gets to be the baby boomers’ age? Well, unless
they finally come up with an anti-aging cream that really works, all their tattoos
are going to look like abstract art on moldy canvases. Salvador Dali results wouldn’t
be so bad, but these are going to be Jackson Pollock-type “What the heck is
that?” stuff.
And don’t even get me
started on the dart boards that some are making themselves into with all the
piercings, and the nose sparklers that look like pimples, and God forbid the black
wheely-things in the earlobes that will never heal back.
Yeah, I don’t get it.
And yeah, I’m an old
fogey—and a crotchety one at that.
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