A Culture of Shitheads

Each mermaid represents a
different venereal disease.

The proliferation of tattoos as casual style is disappointing. In ubiquity, they lose their ability to signify anything other than insufferableness.There was a time (which I am very probably making up) where tattoos were badges earned by sailors upon their first circumnavigation of a whorehouse. If not that, they were shows of yakuza loyalty, ways of counting all the men you'd killed, methods of celebrating romances doomed to end in violence, or mementos of that lazy summer spent in a death camp. The tattoo was a brand, a way of irreversibly committing outlier activities to your flesh. There was a taboo, and it was well-earned.

Nowadays, tattoos are like bumper stickers: a channel for dysfunctional people to express their deeply-held obnoxious beliefs publicly. Hipsters, juggalos, nerds, and Lil Wayne are the main ideological blocs I'm referring to here. If you have twelve tattoos acquired over a period of six months, can any of them be considered special? "This tattoo celebrates that time I bought a churro with NO FILLING. What a wild ride." I'm on board with the body-as-a-canvas metaphor, but owning a paint-able surface doesn't obligate you to scribble dicks all over it.

Tuxedo Mask can't save you from a lifetime of poor decisions.

Once, in a kickboxing class, I saw that the woman in front of me had Pac-Man tattoos all over her arms and legs. I'm pro-Pac-Man, but the moment of recognition was followed by a cringe. Before I'd even talked to her, she had metaphorically screamed out "I LIKE PAC-MAN!" No one likes Pac-Man that much. Not even Toru Iwatani.

Like all modern problems, this can be traced back to Mike Tyson. By popularizing the tribal face tattoo as the new acme of socially unacceptable body modification, he made a great array of slightly less extreme body mods look not quite as insane. Rapist, recluse, trendsetter; truly, Iron Mike was a triple threat.

Read me clearly: I'm not assaulting the right to sculpt your physicality into an avatar of the ever-living Cosmic Jackass. A person's right to tattoos should be as unrestricted as their right to create Herbie the Love Bug flatulence fetish fics or put triple bookshelf spoilers on their Priuses. Monstrous violations of taste are coded into America's red-white-and-blue bedazzled DNA. But Christ, manifest enough self-respect, aesthetic sense, or just plain laziness to refrain from superfluously embellishing your body.