I don’t personally have any tattoos and don’t have any plans to get anyway, but I do appreciate them. Tattoos are a form of collaborative art. The tattoo artist has the obvious role of creating the visual image and putting the ink in the person’s skin, but the person with the tattoo has the idea, and chooses the placement which adds context either just because of the place or other surrounding tattoos. It’s a way for that person to make himself into a work of art and express whatever idea is important to him to express.
I personally have a hard time understanding fairly generic tattoos, particularly flash, since the image is already designed and the person inking it doesn’t really do anything to change it, but I can appreciate that in the same way that people might follow a fashion trend, might just see it as a way of being rebelious or individualistic or whatever. Or maybe though it is just a piece of flash they have some personal connection to it and are either unwilling or unable to spend the time and money to get a special design.
I’m sure you know someone who is, or was, in the military and is really proud of it. Maybe they have a Semper Fi bumper sticker or they talk about it often or whatever. The point is you know that their service is important to them. In that sense, it ought to make sense that, while someone might express the importance of that to others in one way, someone else may simply choose a tattoo. Service tattoos are pretty popular. Similarly, imagine someone who had major life events, like being sober, quitting smoking, having kids, or some other impactful life event. One person might just carry a picture of their kids around, someone else may choose to get a tattoo.
Some people do get them for silly reasons. I’m sure a lot of people who were in their teens and early 20s in the 90s probably are regretting their silly pseudo-tribal tattoos they got because they were cool. But that’s not really any different than getting a weird peircing, or following some other bizarre trend, other than the level of permanence of the decision.
So why don’t I have any? Simply because I’m not interested in showing those sorts of things to random people, and I don’t need a tattoo to remind myself. What expression I do, I do through other forms, like music and poetry, so I’ve never particularly felt the need to express myself in that way. Also, though I have strong beliefs about a lot of things, there’s nothing I’ve particularly felt drawn to share in such a way.