I am sick to death of tattoos. My son is overdone and I have many friends who have lots of ink. It will never be dead in the biker world, but I wish to hell people would just stop it. 10% are art. The rest is ho-hum.
I saw an article a few weeks ago that there is, indeed, a growing trend toward tattoo removal, particular of the Asian character variety that was all the rage a few years ago.
Can’t find the article now, though. One thing I liked was that it had a sidebar about how so many of the Asian tattoos either don’t say what the wearer thought they said or were nonsensical direct translations of English terms into pick-your-Asian-character-set-of-choice.
“I can see marrying a women, settling down, having a couple kids. But a tattoo? It’s so permanent!” -Drake Sather
Something to think about: perhaps those of us with tattoos don’t really care if they are passe? Sure, I’m a 20 year old college student that listens to Britney Spears and has two tattoos (one of which is a butterfly tattoo on my ankle…original, no?), but I didn’t get them because it is “cool.” I got them because looking down and seeing something colorful on my ankle brings a smile to my face. They make me happy and I couldn’t care less if next week they go “out.”
Also, tattoos may be more wildely accepted by the middle classes, but that doesn’t mean it’s mainstream, per se. Sure, you see celebs with tattoos, but you don’t see fashion models walking down cat walks with real tattoos hanging out (certain designers may incorporate fake ones into the design, but that’s not too common).
So yeah, passe or not, they make me smile and that’s all that really ought to matter.
I’ve seen SO many frat guys with the barbed wire or tribal tattoo over the outer part of their upper arm, but clearly NOT over the inner part, because they pussed out when the tattooist reached the softer, more sensitive skin on the underside.
Two Tattoo Tales: My brother, a wildlife biologist, got a tattoo of a thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) on his calf about ten years ago. It was a deeply-felt personal statement about endangerment and extinction.
The ink has aged some it now looks uncannily like the “liger” Napoleon Dynamite drew in the movie. You can see the steam come out of my Bro’s ears when people say “cool liger tattoo, dude!”
My neighbor has CHEVY SILVERADO inked in huge letters from his wrist to his inner-elbow. I assumes this locks him into buying and driving Silverados for the rest of his life.
Getting passe? No, I don’t think so. The have been passe. For at least a decade.
Yep, that’s me. Got one that supposedly says “courage”. Actual translation? Puppy.
Sigh…
Now I’m trying to figure out what to do for a coverup.
‘Rabid’ puppy?
Sorry for the double post, but could this be the article?:
I think I’m going to take a pass on the whole Asian symbology thing.
But look at it this way - doesn’t “puppy” convey all goood concepts like “look, I am beautiful and you will feed me and hug me and love me long time …”? 
(To be fair, I suppose some might see it as meaning" beware, for I shall piss on the floor and I shall eat your shoes" but such people are just cynical).
I have no tattoos: it’s a fad (oh, all righty, a not-really-fad) that has sort of passed me by. Why encounter needles unless I really have to AND pay money for which I have more urgent uses? Not saying I dislike or disapprove of them, merely that it’s something that sort of slips past my radar.
I was in the minority in my fraternity’s pledge class when I decided not to get a tattoo (yes, this was in the early '90s). I don’t regret that decision one bit. Now that my fraternity brothers are all happily reproducing, I’m eagerly anticipating the day when one of their kids asks, for example, “Daddy, why do you have Mr. Yuck the Poison Control Dude on your ankle?”
I’m not sure it’s right to call tattoos in general passe. What has begun to decline is the number of people who are not really serious about tattoos, but who just want a little one on their arm or ankle or small of their back because it’s what everyone else is doing.
I don’t have a tattoo, although it’s a pretty close thing. In the mid-90s, when they were all the rage, i seriously thought about getting one. But after racking my brain for ages, i couldn’t thing of a design that (a) looked cool, and (b) actually had some personal significance for me. I didn’t just want to get something because everyone else was doing it, and when i worked out that there was no design that i could be certain of appreciating ten years down the road, i decided to give it a miss.
I think some tattoos are really great, and really suit the people that have them, but i like it when people have more than just one or two little symbols. I think that tattoos look best if they cover more than a couple of square inches of skin, and full arm sleeves or large back tattoos look great. And i’m a big fan of tattoos on women, as long as they’ve not the typical butterfly or whatever in the small of the back or on the ankle.
Some Sneetches are happy just the way they are.
I’m keen to get two - “Imi” in Japanese which means “meaning” and was one of the reasons my daughter Imogen got her name given her birth elevated my existence, and the other is the kanji for “bell” which is for my other daughter, Isabella. I know enough Japanese to recognise good calligraphy, and so I have no intention of getting the white boys here in Australia to mess it up on my skin.
I was in New York recently and a friend offered to tee me up with someone he knows who does it traditionally - with bamboo dots - the next time I am in town, so unless I get back to Japan in the next year I’ll be getting these done June 2007.
I don’t care much for fads but this is something I’ve wanted for a long time and has special significance for me.
Couldn’t have said it better! Ditto.
But how long will the shop in Las Vegas last? LV is mostly a middle-class place, so I expect as the fad wanes, this sort of shop will go out.
Kind of tangential but I went and watched my nephew’s band play at the University last week. His brother, who is a Jazz musician, turned to me at one point (when we were laughing at the “demonic heavy metal vocals”) and said, “I should tell the guys that once it’s been done on Eurovision, it’s over.”
So yes, tatts mean nothing at all.
They mean something to the people who get them. I always wonder why people who choose not to get a tattoo feel the need to be so vociferous in their disapproval.