The better advice would have been: If you get a tattoo, take care of it so it doesn’t look like crap after a decade. I don’t understand spending hundreds of dollars for a quality forearm sleeve and then never buying a bottle of sunscreen for the rest of your life. On the other hand, though, my grandfather’s completely faded green blotches all over his arm from his merchant marine days were an endless fascination to me as a child.
Yes, people get stupid tattoos (or at least tattoos that appear stupid to outsiders) and get tattoos for stupid reasons.
I like mine. I like my wife’s (and she is extensively covered). I may show off mine because I do like to know how people react to them but I don’t care what people think in the sense that if they don’t like them it doesn’t bother me in the least.
This was precisely my point; people have told me that I shouldn’t get tattoos, because they will look silly when I’m old and wrinkly (I should have stated that part explicitly). My point was that if you’re comfortable with yourself being wrinkly, then wrinky tattoos are not inherently more “gross” or “silly” than non-wrinkly ones. If you love yourself and are comfortable in your skin, a bit of gravity shouldn’t turn beloved tatoos into nightmares.
My friend and I were in a bar talking a little too loudly about how we hate tattoos and some girl walks up to us and said exactly what you said (except she already has them and there are 2).
My friend goes, “At least you didn’t get a dolphin or a butterfly”
You’ll never guess what her two tattoos were.
Because I know you are all waiting with breathless anticipation, the tattoos I especially don’t like:
-A Rose
-A Butterly
-A Dolphin
-anything around the bicep
-tattoos of one’s own face - I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them on NBA players.
-tattoos of one’s one name
-tramp stamps
I personally have always wanted a tattoo that’d really fuck with people. For instance, I’d get some arbitrary common noun tattooed all by itself. I wouldn’t tell anybody what it meant because, well, it doesn’t mean anything. I’d keep a tally to see how many people would ask me what it meant. The best I could hope for is that I’d get someone thinking they knew the reason.
I know a guy who got Optimus Prime on his back. Well, he’s crazy as hell anyway. Got a brother with with St. Martin of Tours on his shoulder, quarter-sleeve, the one where he’s giving the beggar his cloak. He’s a good catlic boy. Worked with a guy who had his son’s footprints (that they do with newborns) inked onto his back. Knew a guy who had the Miller High Life girl tatooed on his right forearms. Sez he got it not cuz of the beer (he switched brands a couple years ago), but because it reminds him of a certain time-period of his life with his buddies he wanted to remember, the good times they had together, the bad, etc. and that’s what it was about. Known lots of guys -lotsa guys- with Texas tattoos. We fuckin love our State, I guess. Knew a guy who memorialized his father (firefighter) just below his neck. My first tattoo -some of the reasons violate the Top Ten. But fuck it, so what? That’s only part of why I got that tattoo. I got it for and with buddies I’d practically grown up with, reminding us of shit we had in common, good times and bad, because all my tattoos follow a certain theme, and for military reasons which governed not just the why but the placement and direction of it. Guess I’m just one of the sheeple. And on that: if Option A is get a tattoo and Option B is don’t get a tattoo, and you’re sheep either way, apparently, that’s not much choice for us not to baa baa.
Just in case anyone is under the mistaken impression that my opinions about tattoos are coming from me trying to be edgy and cool, I’m 42 years old. I am well aware that I left “edgy and cool” back about 20 years ago (and I wasn’t particularly edgy and cool then, either). I just don’t like the little mo-fos.
And now I think Edgy and Cool would be an awesome band name.
But I think they’re acting like sheep - that’s why I said it. They saw a barbed-wire bicep tattoo, and they got one. They saw a butterfly lower back tattoo, and they got one. They saw a Chinese letter tattoo, and they got one. If that doesn’t sound like sheep to you, I don’t know what does. Sheep have to be led - that’s why they put goats in with the sheep, because the sheep won’t go on their own.
So you have no problem with people who have unique tatts, or ones they designed themselves? And how do you separate the cookie cutter tattoo sheep from the cookie cutter everything else in life sheep? Buying the same chair as someone else is just a matter of convenience, because hey, it’s a chair. But you’re telling me that the only decoration you have in your house is self-designed or uniquely commissioned?
Why ask someone what they think of your new hairdo, dress, or accessory? Eh? :dubious: Because it is a part of human interaction, that’s why! Many people with tattoos get them because they like how they look, and really care only “in passing” about what others think of them, much as you do with your choice of hairstyle or clothing.
Have you forgotten that you also are conforming to the non-conformist path? I’m content to do so sometimes, but sometimes I’m also in fashion. I am no sheep! :dubious: (No, I don’t have a tattoo, the main reason being I get rashes from soap and makeup, so didn’t think I’d better risk dye under my skin.)
And you do stuff differently? You go to the store and try to pick out clothes you’ve never seen anyone wear? You put on your make up in exciting new ways?
Also note that all the common tattoos are either “cool” or “pretty”. I promise you that even if me and all my friends got prominent tattoos of vacuum cleaners, that wouldn’t ever lead even a single “sheeple” into getting a matching one. People do stuff they like. Who are you to judge why they like it?
I don’t have a tattoo, but mostly because I’ve never felt enough like getting one. I don’t want to be part of your conformists-conforming-against-nonconformists-conforming revolution.
It is one thing to say that you dislike tattoos. But don’t pretend it is because people who get them are sheep. Unless you are willing, as other people have pointed out, to apply this same thinking to making sure your hairstyle, clothing style, accessory style, shoe style, furniture style, car style, etc., is totally and completely unique and shipped to you express from the Planet Uniqua. Or, to mix a metaphore, you gotta pull the wool out of your own eyes, before you go accusing others of sheepism.
I think that most people get tattoos for themselves *as well as *others that enjoy tattoos. They are aware that many don’t like them, and maybe some of them get them to annoy those people a bit. I don’t know.
But I do know that my eyebrows go up when I see someone call a group of people sheep when the behaviour doesn’t seem very sheep-like to me when I think about it. Usually. I am sure there are just as many sheep in the tattoo community as there are in any other social groups.
Furniture? Designed and built it all myself, except my Laz-E-Boy and my couch.
Decor? All sculptures & paintings by me, except for the 3 Dali lithographs.
Light fixtures? Built 'em myself.
Tattoos? Drew them myself (but paid a pro to do the inking).
What a relief that is to know that I can be a degenerate low-life cretin without having to be a sheeple too.
Yeah, but you feel those lithographs staring at you, boring their melty-clock eyes into your soul night after night after night, just knowing that somewhere else on this planet is someone with exactly the same lithographs as you. His mock him too.
But seriously, damn. You must really love doing stuff. Can’t generally be bothered myself. I just wanted all my stuff to look new to me, so I moved to Japan. No one in my home town has tatami rooms!
Er, not so much? (Sadly…) The idea being, that how would I get rid of the dye (easily) if I did turn out allergic to it? Excise the area? :eek: (And what if I’m very allergic to it?) I don’t know that just staining my skin with the dye would be enough?
