COLUMN: Tattoo You, Not Me

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.