I recall when they were viewed as relics of old sailors and hillbillies.
Since no fashion statement last forever, when do you think they will go from common back to old fashioned?
About the same time the current generation prefers sleeping in to discos.
Ten seconds after I get mine.
As soon as they’re on some teenager’s mom.
And when one of those ass crack floral designs is glimpsed bending down to unload the dishwasher…that’ll do it.
About 5 years ago.
Soon I hope. I think they look awful.
That’d be about now. Actually, many teeangers’ moms who already do a lot of dishwasher unloading are just now *getting * tattoos. It’s completely mainstream now. It couldn’t possibly be more “out” as a statement of rebellion, but it’s not going anywhere, either. It’s now the equivalent of ear-piercing.
The whole thing is so mainstream now that there are actually TWO “reality” shows about it currently running on cable, Inked (on fuddy-duddy A&E, no less!) and Miami Ink.
I give the whole phenomenon another year to three. The regret when all that decoration gets to be seen as passe and gauche again, though, will last for decades.
Its gotta be within a year. Everyone and their grandma is getting tattoos. You go to the gym and there are accountants and lawyers with harley tatoos on their biceps. Bleh, its so overdone.
In a generation, when children who aren’t even imagined yet are visiting their grandparents in the nursing home. The first time a kid sees a withered disgusting daisy or tao of pooh picture on the shriveled foot of Grandma Tiffany or Jenifer, getting a tatoo wont even be imaginable.
That didn’t stop my sister getting one. My Granddad got his in the Merchant Marines back around 1918. By 1980 you could only just make out the design of the woman and the text was just a green blur. Course he’d been gone about 10 years before she got hers.
But I remember well and I’m ink free and plan on never getting anything done.
I thought they were passe no later than about five years ago too. Given these two new “reality” series seems to me to put the nail into the coffin. It means that tattoos are now so common that clever Hollywood people were able to easily pitch these “reality” shows about the endless supply of sex, drugs, and rock and roll that tattoo artists get nowadays.
Now that tattooing is so common, it will probably come and go in waves, like fashion, like jeans or peacoats or whatever else is the “next big thing” every 5-7 years.
I think my 79 year old mother is in need of a tattoo and maybe a tongue piercing. At last, I’ve found her birthday present!
Ya’ know I’m sitting here trying to think what will be the next “rebel” thing to do… And not one thing comes to mind.
Cuz ya’ know they have got to have some outlandish way of expressing themselves.
One of my friends (who sported, as I recall, a mohawk of an odd shade in high school) said that we’d spent so much time shocking our parents that our children will have to come up with something really shockig.
He thinks it will either be those neck ring things that stretch your neck out, or they’ll all convert and become Conservative Christians.
(Sometimes, it seems that the second is happening, which is an interesting take on the popularity of Conservative Christianity - its the radical lesbian feminism of the 2000s to shock your mother who was a radical lesbian feminist in 1973).
I predict mass plastic surgery fads like the pignose, the Spock ears, or the “theme” chin implant.
Either that or they’re all gonna go back to wearing incredibly high-waisted pants, with cel phones on loooong chains instead of pocket watches.
There’s so much bad art out there. People need to be more careful about who does it and what they’re imbedding into their skin.
And if I see one more cartoon character on someone’s body…
Jeans are a fad? I thought the good thing about jeans was that they never get old.
And was there a Peacoat fad I missed or was that just an example?
Tattoos were dead when the first high school wrestler got a picture of Bart Simpson in a singlet on his calf. That probably would have been about 1992.
If you want to show you’re tough nowadays, you’re going to have to get branded.
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- I agree with Trunk; tattoos are no longer the symbol of social rebelliousness they once were. Pantyhose models have them now, and by one US military study, most of the people getting them are female–tattoos are for girls!
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If you wanna make the antisocial impact nowadays, you gotta do branding or cutting. Just remember–don’t do a whole circle at once! 
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