A friend posted a rant on a social media site that set free the hounds that had been dogging me for some time. The post indicated that he could not understand the proliferation of tattoos on men in the St. Louis Missouri area. He wrote that men were working out in the gym, shirtless, and covered in unreadable script. A former advertising department employee, the poster noted that the script used by one tattooed man was an “unreadable font,” principally designed for headers.
I’ve been curious about the proliferation of tattoos for some time. When I was young in the 1950s and 1960s, there were few people brandishing tats, and those who did were former service-people or prison and jailhouse graduates. In my four years in high school, I saw not one person with a tattoo, and the boys in gym class swam naked when it was pool time. (I was on the swim team, so I was allowed to wear my trunks.) There was a trend, sometime in the 70s or 80s, when women would get what my sister called a “tramp stamp,” which was a tattoo on the back, just above the buttocks. This tattoo was visible when the inked one wore low-riding pants and high-riding tank tops and (gasp!) bent over.
In every bar and restaurant that I visit, there are tattooed people. Servers slide drinks to me, extending arms that have graphics climbing from beneath the sleeves and across those arms, as well as the wrists and hands. Of course, these are not the graphics of the thug life: No one has a teardrop beneath the eye, indicating a murderous moment. But in my observance of the tattooed world, I am always curious about the glorious graphics spread across the backs of people. Do those tatted not want to see the wondrous works inscribed on their bodies? Or do they all have “surround body” mirrors that they can use to admire the work?
When I was an Art Director in the advertising department for Indianapolis’ L.S. Ayres department store, we would contract for models to wear the clothing we photographed to put into the catalogs that we sent to the homes of our customers. When the images from the photo-shoots were processed, we were instructed to remove any tattoos that the models might have had.
My youngest daughter has 6 instances of buzz-work (“bzzzz” being the sound of the tattoo thingy). Among them, on her foot, she has her grandmother’s name (my mother,) date of birth, date of death and a lily; she has her own daughter’s name and footprint on an arm, and her thigh is festooned with daffodils, poppies, water lilies and lily of valley. A swallow flies on her shoulder. (She does not know if it is a barn swallow or tree swallow.) The actor Robert LaSordo played Memmo Fierro, an archenemy of Horatio Caine, played by David Caruso. Caine is a Lieutenant in the Miami-Dade Police department’s crime lab; LaSordo is a bandit, and is tattooed from his neck to his… nethers?
Whenever I see ink climbing into and out of the clothing of the people around me, I try to imagine what kind of will power it must take to allow someone to drill ink onto your skin. I also hear the voice of Jimmy Durante, singing his 1933 song: “Ink a dink a dink, a dink a doo…” Perhaps, with so many young people getting buzz-work, I should be hearing the children’s song: “Skidamarink.” As noted in that ditty, the process of getting some ink could mean, “I love you.”
cjon3acd@att.net