As Penn Jillette said: “A tattoo used to mean you’d been in the joint, to sea or on the bally. Now it just means you’ve shopped at Hot Topic.”
There is a significant difference between “I dislike the short haired and tattooed look” and warning someone against having that look. The first is simply an aesthetic choice; the second is an unwarranted assumpton of rights over somebody else.
Having an opinion (and sharing it on a chat board) isn’t the same as enforcing it on another person.
The difference with mullets, Nickelback records, and the afore-mentioned leasure suits is that you can get rid of them. You can shave your head, grow your hair out or just get a better haircut. The Nickkeback records can be sold, donated or used as extra-large skeet. And the leisure suit can be burned, the EPA be damned. But you really can’t have a tattoo removed. You can have a slowly and expensively applied burn in the same shape to replace it, but your skin will never look like it did before (if the “removed” tattoos I’ve seen are any guide).
I was discussing something in between: making assumptions about why people made a particular fashion choice. That’s not a moral issue and it’s not really aesthetic either. It’s more presumptuous than anything else.
Everybody understands this, gaffa. The fact that the tattoo is permanent is the whole point and part of their appeal. Nobody gets a tattoo and then only realizes later that it won’t come off.
To my mind at least, an OP like “Someone want to explain to me this tattoo craze?” etc. is not really a serious request for enlightenment as to the sociological or psychological reasons behind tattooing - it is more along the lines of a backhanded, rhetorical dissing of that particular fashion choice and its popularity.
Yes, yes. That doesn’t really change the basic issue I was discussing, which was the legitimacy of questioning a fashion choice.
I think my main problem with them is I don’t know what I would inscribe upon my body that would be relevant 5, 10, 20 years from now. Times change, taste changes. Relationships change whether you change them or your SO changes them.
…Interest rates fluctuate…
I’ve always know what I wanted as a tattoo.
I can almost remember back when I thought 15 years was a long time. 
I was discussing some types of posts, not the OP here in particular. There have been a wide range of OPs about tattoos and regardless of what the OP says, there are lots of different types of responses. In any case I felt the OP here was more judgmental than backhanded:
I got my first tattoo this summer (at 31). It has a lot of meaning for me, and I put a lot of thought in to it. It is five little footprints (the type you might see on a birth certificate, where the foot is dipped in ink and pressed to paper) running up the left side of my abdomen, over top of the scars from my ectopic surgery last summer. Each footprint represents one of my miscarriages.
Should we have a biological child, I will tattoo their footprint and name on the right side of my abdomen. Should we adopt, their name and footprint will go over my heart. This placement comes from the adopted child tome about not being grown in the womb, but grown in the heart.
Unfortunately, I just recently found I need to add another footprint to my series. I have to pay a full hour for the five minutes it takes, but it’ll be worth it, imo.
Not sure we are disagreeing on that. In fact, I’m pretty sure we aren’t.
To my mind the issue is this: I do not see anything particularly wrong with either (a) making a negative aesthetic judgment about some fashion choice made by others; (b) attempting to understand what motivates adoption of some fashion or other; or (c) pointing out that certain fashion choices are unwise for practical reasons. Consider a feminist analysis of the social significance of high-heel shoes, or pointing out the fact that extremely high heels have disadvantages in terms of ability to run. I can understand that sort of commentary may be right or it may be incorrect, but not that indulging in it is somehow wrong, or too obvious to be worth remarking on.
I do see it as wrong to assign some sort of value to adopting a fashion, as if bad taste indicated moral badness; and I concede it would be extremely rude to diss a fashion choice to the face of someone who has adopted it.
Exactly. Nothing new is ever said (by either side); how *could *it be, the subject is simply not that complex. Threads like these are just a way for people to express their distaste for tattoos in a place where tattooed people are likely see it. Otherwise someone would just start a pit thread where everyone that is so inclined can fall all over themselves thinking up the cleverest way to disparage tattoos.
Right. It’s way past fad status. People need to stop claiming it is.
I didn’t call it a “fad”, I called it a fashion. Like hoop skirts, which came in and out of fashion in three different centuries. The thing about fashions (as opposed to fads) is that wearing old fashions is the definition of “uncool”. Some people can pull it off, but going to a job interview in a powder-blue leisure suit is not recommended. But, like the powder-blue leisure suit, a specific tattoo (and probably tattoos in general) will no longer be fashionable. And you are stuck with it.
But the thing is, by then you’ll probably be old, which is perpetually unfashionable.
I was reserving my criticism for (b)(1), which is making unfounded assumptions about why other people make a particular fashion choice. This is the basis for a lot of the ridicule about tattoos, and you can see a few examples in this thread. There are always a few posts that say people get tattoos to rebel (which is stupid because it’s trying to hard) and that people get tattoos to prove they’re rebels (which is stupid because tattoos are soooo conformist because everybody has them now). That’s not a judgment about the fashion choice, it’s not an attempt to understand, and it’s not a comment on the wisdom. It’s an assumption that people can only make a fashion choice you don’t like because they’re stupider than you.
No, but that’s where you’ve got it wrong. Tattoos are not hoop skirts, they are skirts. They are not powder-blue leisure suits, they are suits. Not the mullet but the haircut. They are their own item of decoration, of which exist many variations. Some variations go in and out of style (maybe barbed wire armband = powder-blue leisure suit), some stand the test of time. Some are public, some are private. And so on.
Plus, honestly, no matter how old I get, the folks around me near my age are still going to have the same number of tattoos. We’ll go to our graves with them, if everything goes right. So it won’t much matter to me if younger folks are getting them or not.
And this is a new point? Something you haven’t said before?
My mother always hated tattoos. The Mormon church frowns on them, and she would always get pissy if she ever saw one. I can’t think of anything you’ve said that she didn’t say 40 years ago, and she’d throw in the defiling your sacred body as well.
Of course, this is a woman whose church-going, non-tattooed husband molested their daughters and beat and abused all their kids, all while she failed to save them. But hey, at least nether one of them had any tattoos, right?
I’d get one but at this age people would only think I’m going through a mid-life crisis. I’ll wait until I’m going through an end of life crisis.