Good article. I like anybody who isn't afraid to write stuff that is likely to be unpopular or controversial.
My take is that all tatoos are basically attention whoring. If you are uninsteresting as a person, no tatoo will fix it and in fact will make matters worse overall.
This said, I also find tramp stamps on a tramp's back to have a certain allure of kink to them, I don't know exactly why. I think those are pretty much the only ones I could understand.
Small comment about tolerance.
I think it is part of the reason that the world continues to turn to shit. Too much tolerance.
In the sense that people have grown afraid to speak their minds so as to not risk offending someone or being perceived in a negative way.
Criticism is good. It's good for the individual, it's good for society.
The woke have corrupted many things including this. Now everything is dismissed as "shaming", while ignoring the very core of the criticism.
I think it's deeper than that. It's more about fake rebellion. Rebellion, like everything else in our society, has been mainstreamed and packaged. It's hard to be a real rebel and, for example, say publicly that the whole Covid thing is a crock of brown stuff. People beat up on you, you lose friends and jobs, and end up isolated. On the other hand, pretending to be a rebel has never been easier. You can get your tattoo, die your hair blue, listen to Rage against the Machine and pretend your a "don't tread on me" Che Guevara. Of course, it goes without saying that everyone I know like that has begged and grovelled for the jab.
A true rebel grows their own food, eats meat, wears modest clothes, goes to church. They reject piercings, tattoos, eating fast “food”, vaccines, getting medical screenings and taking prescription meds. The list is longer…what would you add to it? 🤔
Hey, I remember those! No, seriously, I love old books. The only exception to this rule is the online Project Gutenberg. They have loads of out-of-print classics and obscure books. I'm an Anglo living in a none-Anglophone country, and I can't afford to buy English books, so it's a real life saver. I'm currently reading "Ivanhoe" and loving it. But yep, nothing beats getting lost in a real, hands-on, old book!
Takes their marriage vows seriously, doesn't whore around (male or female), is honest at all times, keeps their word, avoids being a hypocrite, I could go on for a while.
You've nailed it Cynthia. That's the stage we're at. Did you have the misfortune to catch any of the evil on display at the recent Eurovision contest? It was all so stunning and brave! A truly rebellious act there would have been for a beautiful and elegantly dressed young women to sing a lovely, melodious song about real love, innocence and God.
TV was the deciding factor in the Covid scamdemic. I often wondered in awe at the total hysteria among my fellow citizens. Later, it hit me that they all watched TV. As soon as the news came in from Wuhan, the MSM went into a total feeding frenzy. I don't have a TV so that probably helped a hell of a lot in keeping a clear-thinking head.
In my time in the navy (UK), I had a comrade who had a whole body tattoo of a fox hunt. It was a work of art. I won't say where the fox ended up, but let's just say he found a convenient hole before the beagles got him.
Im 56 yrs old. When I was growing in a very conservative jewish home. A tatoo was a deeply disturbing toxic thing . In my protected cultural circle as a youth, people with tattoos were considered to be psychopaths, criminals, drug dealers, murderers, Hells angels, etc. etc. rapists… piercings, too
The shocking tattoo to me was Mike Tyson's face tattoo, which he got in 2003 and which was the first of its kind that I had seen outside of prison tattoos. I thought it was a mark of deep mental illness at the time. Today it would be unremarkable.
The mass proliferation of tattoos I see as an effect of Calhoun's mouse experiments on a human scale. In John Calhoun’s 1962 experiments, four pairs of mice were introduced into a utopian environment. There was no shortage of food or water or nesting materials, no predators, with the only limit being limited space. The population grew rapidly, reaching 620 by day 315, after which the population growth starting decreasing rapidly. Day 600 was the last surviving birth, bringing the total population to 2,200 mice, even though the experiment setup allowed for as many as 3,840 mice in terms of nesting space. The period between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and in normal social behavior. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young (like transsexualism today), increase in homosexual behavior, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and mating partners, increasing anger in both non-dominant males who didn’t mate and females who couldn’t nurse or raise pups properly. After day 600 the population declined toward extinction, where females ceased to reproduce and male counterparts withdrew completely - they ate, drank, slept and groomed themselves, all solitary pursuits (like incels today). The conclusions from the experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles filled, competition and the stresses experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown in complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in the demise of the population.
Look, if you’re a harpooneer from some obscure South Sea Island - a’la “Queequeg” from Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” I get it. If you were career USMC - or did a stint - I get that too - the Anchor & Globe - but the rest of it I don’t get/understand. If I want to hang art I have four walls for that. If I see an attractive woman with one it an immediate turn off. Reads “trailer park”.
Your descriptions of tattoos made my evening. Oh how I love to read an author's words when they are so utterly perfectly descriptive. Mark Twain came to mind 😁....that said, see tattoos as a symbol of self loathing; an outward expression of a lack of any self worth. I thank God I have no ability to understand the desire to have one.
In the UK Daily Mail, which, to my shame, I still occasionally peruse, there are quite regularly stories about people who have awful facial tattoos complaining about how marginalised and misunderstood they are. Apparently, it's hard to get a job. Soon tattoo-shaming will be like fat-shaming. Everyone a victim!
Back in the 1990s I was involved in the goth scene and knew a lot of freaky people who were big fans of the book Modern Primitives. This book described scarification , tattooing, and some other practices as ways in which disaffected, artsy young moderns could reconnect with ancient spiritualities, yadda yadda. Nobody talks about this book any more, not even in articles like this one, but it was quite influential at the time and, IMHO, helped rebrand tattoos as a legit form of personal expression for quiet, educated, artistic people with no connection whatever to prisons, the military, criminal gangs, etc. the gothy tattoos had to be all black, of course: unique, one-of-a-kind designs created by the wearer himself, with some kind of quasi-spiritual meaning. Eventually the goth subculture withered and shrank, and formed unexpected connections with various trashy and ironic retro styles, giving us the horrible contemporary trend of affluent, educated purple-haired girls with gaudy, stupid tattoos who fancy themselves subversive artists. This trend should be self-canceling, as mirrors are everywhere, but the participants clearly lack self-awareness and perception. Tattoos are now worn by conservative Christian normies like my sister-in-law; if that doesn’t kill this trend, nothing will.
I am a pure skin…. But I look historically at why people had tattoos. Mostly they were a way of expressing membership into a chosen group. An identity marker. Many women had tattoos marking them as property, especially of a man (prostitutes often had them)….
In a society bereft of identity people are trying desperately to find it
Yep. I study history and have never found a civilisation or society that comes back from this. I mentioned above the Eurovision song contest. Fortunately, I didn't watch it, but seeing the photos in the papers reminded me that not only is our current civilisation dying but that it fully deserves too. I have children, so I still have a stake in the game, but even so, I really want this evil society to fail so we can begin the rebuilding.
I get your frustration. Unfortunately, civilizational collapse is a slow, horrible process. The rebuilding also takes time. If your kids are around when we hit bottom, they won’t be around for the rebuilding. Pax Romana lasted two hundred years, till about 240 AD. The worst sack of Rome was in 476 AD. Rome came back during the renaissance, a thousand years later.
GC, you have a way with words that makes my inked skin tingle with delight.
"Walking human billboard of regret", "burgeoning narcissistic generations advertisiing their impulsively conformist socio-cultural bona fides", "the awful stamp of nihilistic incontinence polluting their outer thigh or smeared across their entire forearm like some kind of completely unnatural birth deformity or dermal malady". I sometimes can't stop grinning when I read your articles.
From counterculture to mainstream conformity, we find yet another art form that has been rendered devoid of soul. You gotta hand it to the nihilist system overlords: they sure know how to suck life out of every expression of human creativity.
Some trivia from chatgpt:
- The earliest known evidence of tattooing dates back to between 3370 and 3100 BCE with the discovery of Ötzi the Iceman, a naturally mummified human found in the Alps near the Italy-Austria border. His skin bore 61 tattoos consisting of simple dots and lines, which some researchers speculate could have been applied for therapeutic reasons.
- Many ancient civilizations practiced tattooing. In Egypt, tattoos were found on female mummies dating back to 2000 BCE. These tattoos often held symbolic significance, possibly denoting status, fertility, or protection. In Polynesia, tattooing (known as 'tatau') was a rite of passage that symbolized cultural identity and social status.
- In ancient Rome and Greece, tattoos were often seen as a mark of disgrace or punishment. The Latin word for tattoo, 'stigma,' underlined this negative perception. However, in some cases, tattoos were used to denote ownership of enslaved individuals.
- For many Indigenous tribes in North America, tattoos were deeply symbolic, often connected to spiritual beliefs or signifying achievements, status, or tribal identity.
- During the Middle Ages in Europe, tattoos became less common and were often associated with criminality or barbarism due to prevailing religious and cultural norms. However, in the 18th century, tattoos began to re-emerge among sailors and explorers who encountered tattooed cultures during their voyages.
Interesting trivia there. Stigma. Haha. That seems about right. Perhaps I was better suited for the middle ages, though statistically I would have died last decade, probably from bad teeth. Glad I made you grin Carel.
The Greeks thought of tattoos as something for slaves, for it is among the greatest of humiliations to have someone literally brand you by tainting your body, which is the physical emanation of your soul and a work of art.
Today, people think they are a “nervous system piloting a flesh puppet” (they are retarded) so they are fine with “modding their ride” I suppose
Good article. I like anybody who isn't afraid to write stuff that is likely to be unpopular or controversial.
My take is that all tatoos are basically attention whoring. If you are uninsteresting as a person, no tatoo will fix it and in fact will make matters worse overall.
This said, I also find tramp stamps on a tramp's back to have a certain allure of kink to them, I don't know exactly why. I think those are pretty much the only ones I could understand.
Small comment about tolerance.
I think it is part of the reason that the world continues to turn to shit. Too much tolerance.
In the sense that people have grown afraid to speak their minds so as to not risk offending someone or being perceived in a negative way.
Criticism is good. It's good for the individual, it's good for society.
The woke have corrupted many things including this. Now everything is dismissed as "shaming", while ignoring the very core of the criticism.
fat shaming, tatoo shaming, etc. insanity
I think it's deeper than that. It's more about fake rebellion. Rebellion, like everything else in our society, has been mainstreamed and packaged. It's hard to be a real rebel and, for example, say publicly that the whole Covid thing is a crock of brown stuff. People beat up on you, you lose friends and jobs, and end up isolated. On the other hand, pretending to be a rebel has never been easier. You can get your tattoo, die your hair blue, listen to Rage against the Machine and pretend your a "don't tread on me" Che Guevara. Of course, it goes without saying that everyone I know like that has begged and grovelled for the jab.
A true rebel grows their own food, eats meat, wears modest clothes, goes to church. They reject piercings, tattoos, eating fast “food”, vaccines, getting medical screenings and taking prescription meds. The list is longer…what would you add to it? 🤔
Reads books printed on paper.
Hey, I remember those! No, seriously, I love old books. The only exception to this rule is the online Project Gutenberg. They have loads of out-of-print classics and obscure books. I'm an Anglo living in a none-Anglophone country, and I can't afford to buy English books, so it's a real life saver. I'm currently reading "Ivanhoe" and loving it. But yep, nothing beats getting lost in a real, hands-on, old book!
I also get a lot of pdfs from internet archive
That's another great source. They have old films too
Carrying a CONCEALED firearm (even when the sign says ‘No Firearms’) and doing at least minimal prepping.
Takes their marriage vows seriously, doesn't whore around (male or female), is honest at all times, keeps their word, avoids being a hypocrite, I could go on for a while.
I've nailed two of those!
You've nailed it Cynthia. That's the stage we're at. Did you have the misfortune to catch any of the evil on display at the recent Eurovision contest? It was all so stunning and brave! A truly rebellious act there would have been for a beautiful and elegantly dressed young women to sing a lovely, melodious song about real love, innocence and God.
(Un)fortunately I missed that one! 😉😜
It cannot be unseen.
Oh that’s awful 😬
Doesn't own a TV, rejects health insurance altogether, homeschools their kids (if there are kids).
TV was the deciding factor in the Covid scamdemic. I often wondered in awe at the total hysteria among my fellow citizens. Later, it hit me that they all watched TV. As soon as the news came in from Wuhan, the MSM went into a total feeding frenzy. I don't have a TV so that probably helped a hell of a lot in keeping a clear-thinking head.
One of my favorites: a tattoo on a young pretty woman looks as good as a bumper sticker on a ferrari
In my time in the navy (UK), I had a comrade who had a whole body tattoo of a fox hunt. It was a work of art. I won't say where the fox ended up, but let's just say he found a convenient hole before the beagles got him.
And don’t get me started on the freaking nose rings. Is it motivated by the desire to be more like livestock?
So many beautiful young women sporting those ugly piercings, including my beautiful niece. It makes me sad.
As a tattooer for twenty years, I couldn’t agree more. Damnit.
I admire your chosen art (despite my words here) and appreciate your honesty at the same time.
"the dermally defiled" "walking human billboards of regret" ... priceless
Im 56 yrs old. When I was growing in a very conservative jewish home. A tatoo was a deeply disturbing toxic thing . In my protected cultural circle as a youth, people with tattoos were considered to be psychopaths, criminals, drug dealers, murderers, Hells angels, etc. etc. rapists… piercings, too
Now it’s a youth culture affectation
The shocking tattoo to me was Mike Tyson's face tattoo, which he got in 2003 and which was the first of its kind that I had seen outside of prison tattoos. I thought it was a mark of deep mental illness at the time. Today it would be unremarkable.
The mass proliferation of tattoos I see as an effect of Calhoun's mouse experiments on a human scale. In John Calhoun’s 1962 experiments, four pairs of mice were introduced into a utopian environment. There was no shortage of food or water or nesting materials, no predators, with the only limit being limited space. The population grew rapidly, reaching 620 by day 315, after which the population growth starting decreasing rapidly. Day 600 was the last surviving birth, bringing the total population to 2,200 mice, even though the experiment setup allowed for as many as 3,840 mice in terms of nesting space. The period between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and in normal social behavior. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young (like transsexualism today), increase in homosexual behavior, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and mating partners, increasing anger in both non-dominant males who didn’t mate and females who couldn’t nurse or raise pups properly. After day 600 the population declined toward extinction, where females ceased to reproduce and male counterparts withdrew completely - they ate, drank, slept and groomed themselves, all solitary pursuits (like incels today). The conclusions from the experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles filled, competition and the stresses experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown in complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in the demise of the population.
Look, if you’re a harpooneer from some obscure South Sea Island - a’la “Queequeg” from Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” I get it. If you were career USMC - or did a stint - I get that too - the Anchor & Globe - but the rest of it I don’t get/understand. If I want to hang art I have four walls for that. If I see an attractive woman with one it an immediate turn off. Reads “trailer park”.
Everyone had his/her favorite printed T-shirt at the age of 20. I doubt many still love to wear it at age of 40+.
Even if I would love to wear it, it wouldn't fit!
Me and my brother were talking to each other
'Bout what makes a man a man
Was it brain or brawn, or the month you were born
We just couldn't understand
Our old man didn't like our appearance
He said that only women wear long hair
So me and my brother borrowed money from Mother
We knew what we had to do
We went downstairs, past the barber and gymnasium
And got our arms tattooed
Welcome to my life, tattoo
I'm a man now, thanks to you
I expect I'll regret you but the skin graft man won't get you
You'll be there when I die
Tattoo
My dad beat me 'cause mine said "Mother"
But my mother naturally liked it and beat my brother
'Cause his tattoo was of a lady in the nude
And my mother thought that was extremely rude
Welcome to my life, tattoo
We've a long time together, me and you
I expect I'll regret you but the skin graft man won't get you
You'll be there when I die
Tattoo
Now I'm older, I'm tattooed all over
My wife is tattooed too
A rooty-toot-toot, rooty-tooty-toot-toot
Rooty-toot-toot tattoo too
To you
Radio London reminds you, go to the church of your choice!
THE WHO https://youtu.be/rI0cfzAF4as?si=VjpPsr95iOyWN99P Enjoy
Your descriptions of tattoos made my evening. Oh how I love to read an author's words when they are so utterly perfectly descriptive. Mark Twain came to mind 😁....that said, see tattoos as a symbol of self loathing; an outward expression of a lack of any self worth. I thank God I have no ability to understand the desire to have one.
I think this is true. It is an artistic form of self-abuse. Intentional scarring. Plus advertising poor impulse control.
In the UK Daily Mail, which, to my shame, I still occasionally peruse, there are quite regularly stories about people who have awful facial tattoos complaining about how marginalised and misunderstood they are. Apparently, it's hard to get a job. Soon tattoo-shaming will be like fat-shaming. Everyone a victim!
Not to mention fatties with bad tattoos. The discrimination against them must be epic 😂
Lesbian fatties with tattoos and in-growing toe nails.
Back in the 1990s I was involved in the goth scene and knew a lot of freaky people who were big fans of the book Modern Primitives. This book described scarification , tattooing, and some other practices as ways in which disaffected, artsy young moderns could reconnect with ancient spiritualities, yadda yadda. Nobody talks about this book any more, not even in articles like this one, but it was quite influential at the time and, IMHO, helped rebrand tattoos as a legit form of personal expression for quiet, educated, artistic people with no connection whatever to prisons, the military, criminal gangs, etc. the gothy tattoos had to be all black, of course: unique, one-of-a-kind designs created by the wearer himself, with some kind of quasi-spiritual meaning. Eventually the goth subculture withered and shrank, and formed unexpected connections with various trashy and ironic retro styles, giving us the horrible contemporary trend of affluent, educated purple-haired girls with gaudy, stupid tattoos who fancy themselves subversive artists. This trend should be self-canceling, as mirrors are everywhere, but the participants clearly lack self-awareness and perception. Tattoos are now worn by conservative Christian normies like my sister-in-law; if that doesn’t kill this trend, nothing will.
I loved RE/Search pubs! Angry Women introduced me to feminism. I never have read Modern Primitives.
https://www.researchpubs.com/shop/p/modern-primitives
I am a pure skin…. But I look historically at why people had tattoos. Mostly they were a way of expressing membership into a chosen group. An identity marker. Many women had tattoos marking them as property, especially of a man (prostitutes often had them)….
In a society bereft of identity people are trying desperately to find it
The descent into barbarism...
Yep. I study history and have never found a civilisation or society that comes back from this. I mentioned above the Eurovision song contest. Fortunately, I didn't watch it, but seeing the photos in the papers reminded me that not only is our current civilisation dying but that it fully deserves too. I have children, so I still have a stake in the game, but even so, I really want this evil society to fail so we can begin the rebuilding.
I get your frustration. Unfortunately, civilizational collapse is a slow, horrible process. The rebuilding also takes time. If your kids are around when we hit bottom, they won’t be around for the rebuilding. Pax Romana lasted two hundred years, till about 240 AD. The worst sack of Rome was in 476 AD. Rome came back during the renaissance, a thousand years later.
GC, you have a way with words that makes my inked skin tingle with delight.
"Walking human billboard of regret", "burgeoning narcissistic generations advertisiing their impulsively conformist socio-cultural bona fides", "the awful stamp of nihilistic incontinence polluting their outer thigh or smeared across their entire forearm like some kind of completely unnatural birth deformity or dermal malady". I sometimes can't stop grinning when I read your articles.
From counterculture to mainstream conformity, we find yet another art form that has been rendered devoid of soul. You gotta hand it to the nihilist system overlords: they sure know how to suck life out of every expression of human creativity.
Some trivia from chatgpt:
- The earliest known evidence of tattooing dates back to between 3370 and 3100 BCE with the discovery of Ötzi the Iceman, a naturally mummified human found in the Alps near the Italy-Austria border. His skin bore 61 tattoos consisting of simple dots and lines, which some researchers speculate could have been applied for therapeutic reasons.
- Many ancient civilizations practiced tattooing. In Egypt, tattoos were found on female mummies dating back to 2000 BCE. These tattoos often held symbolic significance, possibly denoting status, fertility, or protection. In Polynesia, tattooing (known as 'tatau') was a rite of passage that symbolized cultural identity and social status.
- In ancient Rome and Greece, tattoos were often seen as a mark of disgrace or punishment. The Latin word for tattoo, 'stigma,' underlined this negative perception. However, in some cases, tattoos were used to denote ownership of enslaved individuals.
- For many Indigenous tribes in North America, tattoos were deeply symbolic, often connected to spiritual beliefs or signifying achievements, status, or tribal identity.
- During the Middle Ages in Europe, tattoos became less common and were often associated with criminality or barbarism due to prevailing religious and cultural norms. However, in the 18th century, tattoos began to re-emerge among sailors and explorers who encountered tattooed cultures during their voyages.
Etc., etc.
Interesting trivia there. Stigma. Haha. That seems about right. Perhaps I was better suited for the middle ages, though statistically I would have died last decade, probably from bad teeth. Glad I made you grin Carel.
The Greeks thought of tattoos as something for slaves, for it is among the greatest of humiliations to have someone literally brand you by tainting your body, which is the physical emanation of your soul and a work of art.
Today, people think they are a “nervous system piloting a flesh puppet” (they are retarded) so they are fine with “modding their ride” I suppose
Looks like scratching up a Ferrari to make it look better.