"What a tale a tattoo tells!"

In PJ Media, David Solway writes,

How one can appraise sumptuary excesses like the fade cut, pink hair, septum rings, tongue studs, navel piercings, and the prevalence of the orgulous tattoo as in any way attractive boggles the mind.

...Younger people, in particular, tend to see tats as rendering them sexy or painting them rebellious. But there is more to it than that.

...In trying to be different, we all become the same, a herd of individuals sporting the same ideas, the same tastes, the same mullet or fade, the same bell-bottom trousers, the same body piercings, the same ideological fashions, the same fondness for tattoos.

...By all accounts tattoos are not a benign phenomenon. They can expose their bearers to HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C. Tattoos can affect the way a body sweats, causing loss of electrolytes. They accentuate the risk of infection and enhance the possibility of melanoma. Pregnancy and weight gain can lead to tattoo distortion. As plastic surgeon Cormac Joyce writes, tattooing “involves the integration of metallic salts and organic dyes into the dermal layer of the skin,” which may produce “malignant transformation.” Justin Caba in Medical Daily notes the rise of what is called “tattoo regret” and “tattoo remorse,” especially in light of its difficulty of removal and sometimes permanence. As people grow older or gain in maturity, they may come to realize the indignity and indeed deformity associated with the tattoo.

Nonetheless, the tattoo persists as a sign of the times. It is not merely a moderately popular eccentricity or cutaneous affectation, which in itself or as a single instance need not be offensive. But in whatever way its extraordinary prominence and body coverage may be interpreted, it strikes me as a massively tribal phenomenon involving the carpeting of the body on the assumption that such overlays function as a species of armor or a web of apotropaic patterns—that is, signs intended to parry or deflect evil influences—or a narrative of the self graven in a visible medium. Such figures or devices may come to the fore when a culture senses the loss of authentic identity or begins to suspect it has no right to exist, that it is subject to the curse of erasure. They represent an attempt to impose meaning in a worried recognition that meaning has gone out of the culture. We live in a time of dark intuitions, a time of endings, in which the integrated and substantial self is eroding under the corrosive effect of the loss of historical confidence, of gender fluidity, runaway multiculturalism, political correctness, vast educational deficits and the rise of collectivist ideology. Like Cain, we are under threat for our complicity in an act of violence—call it cultural homicide.

In such times a generation may strive to mark itself as singular and separate, as an assembly of heroic individuals reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Übermensch rising above the “last man” of a dying culture—fighting the recognition that they are themselves these “last men.” They see themselves as the initiates of the future, as special cases, as different from the common ruck, as “marked out,” as deserving of redemption, as unique and distinctive. Unfortunately, it is a generation that has little to distinguish itself apart from the external excrescences of bark art, signalling an unmerited estimation of the self. Such ostensible badges of uniqueness are really emblems of desperation and one-dimensional effigies of mundane sameness, in effect, disfigurements that betoken an inner suspicion of weakness and vulnerability, and of the need for protection.

What a tale a tattoo tells! Admittedly, my reading of a cultural contagion is merely a rarefied hypothesis, yet it may enjoy a degree of plausibility. It may be argued that in the absence of spiritual depth and intellectual substance, these stamped epitomes of a culture in extremis seek to establish an epidermal identity as the only psychic option remaining to them. In a time of historical amnesia and hedonistic excess, they call attention to themselves in the only way they know how—through an emblazoned superficiality. Perhaps they may be saved. They bear the Mark.

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