A MATTER OF OPINION

I hope my son-in-law doesn’t read this because I am going to quote him (as nearly as I can remember.)
“Tattoos are a lifestyle choice. I don’t think they’re either good or bad.” That comment ism one of the reasons I like him, married to me daughter for more than 20 years. He is a very strong alpha male with very strongly voiced views. But he seems, in so many ways, to be perfectly non-judgmental. “What will be will be,” he often says. You would think that someone with such an easy-going attitude might be something of an idler. Far from it. He is enormously successful in his field of marketing, and enjoys the confidence (and fees) of some large companies.

But this is not about him. That would be embarrass him. It is about me and my exactly opposite view: judgmental. I groan when I see an arm covered in gaudy tattoos, especially on an otherwise good-looking young woman. My wife groans with me.

Are we neo-phobes? Are we younger-generation-bashers? Are we smug old fogies sneering at “kids today?” Are we, because of our many years of experience, entitled to make judgments? In places like China the elderly are esteemed – the older they are, the most esteem seems to flow. In our culture, if we are old enough to remember The Beatles arrival in America, we are irrelevant. That we don’t care for tattoos (abhor them in fact) is a matter of no concern to the self-decorated twits who believe that they are the height of fashion with their faux barbed wire armlets and slithering snakes and cute little butterflies adorning deliciously hidden parts of the anatomy.
What we always say, echoed perhaps by others of our generation is: style is one thing, but changeless style is quite another. What is chic today is “so yesterday” tomorrow. You can live with green hair and black nail polish because it will go away as soon as the style changes. No so the tattoo. It is an indelible thing, and as it fades over the years becomes even less attractive.

In years to come your tattoo will identify you as a member of the “me generation” of the 2000s. Just as when I see a man with a pony tail – the top of the head nearly bald, the colour grey, clinging to his own reminder of the years when we “let it all hang out,” the Woodstock and Bob Dylan years. The protests. The musical “Hair.” The conversation that began with: “What’s your sign?”

So it is that every generation is marked by its style. But the tattoo is forever. One day, just as I am today’s old fogy, you know-it-all kids with the tattoos, will be identified as old fogys, identified by the mark that identifies you permanently as a member of the forgotten past.