I would much rather hear a tattoo story than discuss the weather, politics, or hear griping about parking spaces at the mall.
Most boring topic I find is people trying to top each other with their “this one time I was so wasted that” stories. Oh yes, tell me again how you drank soooo much and if you could please include a list of alcohols and their quantities. I am sure to be impressed by your consumption skill and inebriation levels.
Tattoo stories are interesting as long as the person is interesting. I don’t see it as any less interesting as asking someone what they do for a living and at least the person with the tattoo cares enough about their story to make it a permanent part of them so you should get a better response then someone who hate their job.
The producer of my TV show got a moonshine jug tattoo during the filming of our first season since it some of the most fun he’d had making a TV show in his 30 year career. That’s certainly more a more interesting story than him telling you he makes TV shows for a living.
This thread is a great reminder of why I hate parties. It’s so difficult to have a conversation of substance with complete strangers.
That would have been my choice. Sometimes, the stories are interesting. Sometimes they aren’t. I ended up going with “enjoy it every single time” because that was a little closer to my experience.
This is the real answer. Someone’s tattoo story is usually a nice little icebreaker telling me something interesting about that person and what they care about. A dull person is likely to have a long dull story, but an interesting person will either have an interesting story or a short one.
I don’t have any tattoos. I don’t usually find myself in discussions about them. If it happened all the time, maybe I would grow bored with such discussions. But in actual experience is that it’s come up perhaps half a dozen times at parties, and so far, I’ve always found it interesting.
I find they usually tell me something about the person, and I find getting someone to talk about themselves in any way to be one of the better ways to get an actual conversation going, rather than just get stuck on the small talk phase.
And, well, if I’m going to talk to you, then I am of course interested in what you have to say. How interested varies–I may just be bored. But I am interested enough to talk to you.
If you mean other people talking to each other–it’s less boring than both nothing and other topics, but, unless I’m interested in the person, I’ll probably find something else to do than listen.
My wife has a tattoo on her arm that says “LEGO ERGO SUM”. It’s actually a pretty good conversation starter.
My most boring discussing was hearing my father-in-law and his siblings discussing the amazing deals they got at some Costco-type warehouse-club store. Not even interesting things, but daily life purchases like the value-for-money of various brands of toilet paper.
Hell is the boredom of retirement-age mcmansion-owners discussing the most trivial banalities of their existence.
If you want to find me at a party, I’m the one in the corner playing with the dog.
Beat me to it. Lots of people, with and without tattoos, are boring. Their circumstances are mundane, their choices predictable, and their stories about themselves are lacking in any original insight or humorous delivery. Of course their tattoo stories are going to be boring. All of their stories are boring, unless you happen to care about them in particular, or you happen to be enough of a people person, to find their basic journey interesting.
I once read a really insightful aside in a women’s magazine about an overheard conversation. Two women at the gym were talking about their weight loss efforts; one mentioned she had lost a lot of weight when she got sick and was in bed for a week, unable to eat. The other related a similar story about losing weight when her cat died and she was too upset to eat. To me it sounded like a frivolous conversation between two shallow people. But the eavesdropping author had a deeper take on the situation, noting that the topic of weight loss, something they had in common, served as a vehicle to discuss things that were more personal. “Weight was the medium, not the message,” was how she put it, if I recall correctly.
I’m still a misanthrope who finds most people boring. But I also realize that their feelings, values, and experiences are special, important, and interesting to them, and mine might not be.
OP, are you not yet of the age where the more frequent topic is various medical procedures and health alerts? Because, I guarantee you, someone’s cholesterol medication is far less interesting than someone’s tattoo.
I can’t figure out if your house is full of books or small plastic bricks. Does the font make it obvious?
Ah, now that may be the most boring topic ever.
Both, actually, but the tat refers to the former.
I had a colleague who was like that–she got tattoos generally on a whim. Though with some inquiring, the tattoos individually didn’t mean much but the act of getting tattooed was, itself, meaningful. It’s been some years and I couldn’t do it justice, but I was deeply fascinated by a person whose thinking was so radically different than mine.
The difference for me, I think, was the look of… passion, I suppose, that they might have. That it was a topic of deep personal interest to them. Even rambling narratives lead to clues about what was interesting, and a couple questions about details could keep a person talking for hours… well, with the caveat that there was some degree of thinking involved.
Granted, I knew a lot of really “interesting” people, many of whom had tattoos, so it was an easy icebreaker at loud parties.
Sports in general, but golf, specifically is definitively THE most boring conversation on earth!
By heaps and heaps.
And this is why I have a hard time hobnobbing or engaging in causal conversations. I find most topics incredibly boring. At the top of the list is sports. I couldn’t care less about football, or baseball, or basketball, or any sport. I also don’t care about movies, food, religion, politics, or what’s on Netflix. If I bring up the Fermi Paradox, then they get bored. I guess I’m no fun at parties. 
I think I can summarize the OP as:
When people talk about a hobby they share that I don’t, that seems boring to me.
No kidding there Ace. Tatoos, especially once somebody has more than one, are definitely a hobby.
I am not a fan of tatoos. I’m showing my curmudgeonly side, but to me they scream low-rent trash, just as they did back in the 1950s.
But I do often compliment people on them sincerely. As art they can be skillful or interesting or colorful even as (IMO) they’re disfiguring the human they’re attached to. And for sure when I do admire someone’s tatoo(s) they just light up and are happy to talk about them.
Which I suppose means it served it’s purpose for both of us.
Most boring, no. Ahead of tattoos - people who have to explain their D&D character to you. People whose only topic of conversation is their child (children are more interesting than tattoos, but tattoo conversations have an end - children just provide fodder for more and more boring conversations). People who want to talk in great depth about the plays in the last sportsball event - dissecting a game you didn’t see and aren’t interested in. But pretty darn boring.
I forgot the people who like to quote things (movies, tv shows, commercials, video games) they like at length (not just a quote at an appropriate moment, but whole scenes) and feel that spewing quotes back and forth is the same thing as a conversation.
It is not.
This is why summarizing is so important. The following things wouldn’t bother me at all:
“My favorite character ever was a trickster cleric who invented his own religion and a secret society; telling fantastical lies as a key part of the character was so fun.”
“I got this tattoo when I broke up with my lover. It’s a tree without leaves that reminds me that spring will come again.”
“I dreamt last night that I was in a cage match against Miley Cyrus, and I had a math test in an hour that I hadn’t studied for. Not like I have any anxiety or anything.”
“Man, the game last night was amazing: it went into double overtime and came down to a three-pointer that scored right as the buzzer sounded!”
Give me a ten-second summary that highlights an interesting or funny bit, and I’m delighted to hear it for (almost) any subject.
But I’m a huge D&D nerd, and if you decide I need a five-minute monologue on your character’s stats and the sweet magic item the DM gave you and a laundry list of the creatures you’ve murdered, Christ almighty I’ll be looking for a way to autocrit myself.