This new wave of tattoos gets under my skin
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Version 0 of 1. With everyone busting out the T-shirts, sundresses and shorts in this heatwave, I am finally faced with the difficult realisation that nice people have tattoos. Efficient people who know how the photocopier works, kind people who give up their seat on the bus, ethical people who don’t eat meat but are too discreet to make a fuss when you do. Even the very clever – and nice – new presenter of Newsnight, Evan Davis. Climbing up these people’s charming arms or down their polite legs are dolphins, dragons, roses and, for the especially swotty, Latin tags. And I hate them all (the tattoos, not the people – though the boundary bleeds between the two like a back-street inking). Of course I hate myself too. For what could be more close-minded and short-sighted than passing judgment on what someone chooses to do with their body? I feel like a throwback, obliged to stifle an involuntary shudder when the waitress who serves my flat white reveals a sleeve tatt as long as, well, her arm. “What on earth does your mother think?” I inwardly tut, avoiding the uncomfortable thought that her mother probably has one too. Naturally it goes back to the fact that in my 1970s childhood tattoos were worn by a different kind of person. Not necessarily wicked or criminal – although that’s how they seemed to me. These sailors, lorry drivers and Hell’s Angels of the postwar world marked themselves as living outside the social norms where the rest of us quietly resided. They looked like members of a dangerous tribe that might surround the stockade in the middle of the night. Of course, anyone with an ounce of intellectual curiosity or emotional openness will know that all this is wild nonsense, socially constructed. Indeed, it’s at this point someone always pipes up that “tattoos used to be upper class”. Winston Churchill had one and so did his mum. However, these days we have Sam Cam with a dolphin just below her ankle while Emma Parker-Bowles is reported to have a kitten on her bottom. By this reckoning, today’s tattoo wearers may simply be social climbers, adopting a status symbol in the way that people 10 years ago would wear green wellies in the King’s Road. Or you could suggest instead that the current trend for “respectable” young people to get a tattoo is a response to the current crisis in body image; they may simply be kicking back against society’s demands that they should be absurdly slender, shaved or pumped. By this reading, tattooing is not an act of disguised self-harming, but a celebratory turning of the ordinary self into a work of art. For the political analyst, meanwhile, today’s mild and well-mannered skin inkers are simply playing with nostalgic ideas of rebellion. Since there is nowhere to be an outlaw any more, the best anyone can do is fiddle on the margins. Getting a rose on your upper thigh may be your way of working for the man while signalling to your nearest and dearest that you are not a slave to him. All these arguments are wearingly familiar, yet they make not a jot of difference to my visceral reaction when I see a Celtic cross marching down someone’s upper arm. In response to a stranger’s body my own starts to respond with waves of nausea. Today’s tattoos make me anxious because they jumble the categories by which I first learned to make sense of the world, the difference between safe and unsafe. This doesn’t make me proud, but it is worth attending to because this is how prejudice starts, with a fear so deep it cannot be reasoned away, no matter how much we wish it to be. The best we can do, perhaps, is acknowledge it freely to ourselves, then learn to bite our tongues. |