The Evolution and Rise of theTattoo.

Kid with ink drawing mimicking tattoos.  Bad tattoos like that were pretty common on servicemen with I was young.  It wasn't the art of it, they were badges of a sort.

Allow me to be frank.  I'm not keen on tattoos.

And that being the case, of course, I've had to accommodate myself to a massive societal shift concerning them.

When I was a boy, teenager and young adult, only men had tattoos, and only certain men.  I can distinctly recall the first time I saw a woman with a tattoo.  It was actually at Mass on a Saturday night, and there was a Hispanic woman with a rose tattooed on her shoulder.  It was quite a surprise, frankly, as I'd never seen a tattooed woman before, and by that time I'd been in college for several years and had been in the National Guard for several years as well.  It wasn't as if I hadn't been around a bit.  But I'd never seen that.

FWIW, she was quite stunning and rather strongly resembled Linda Rondstadt.

Anyhow, I've obviously seen a lot more tattoos on women since then and it doesn't shock me anymore.  I still don't like it.

Back in my youth only certain men had tattoos.  The most common tattooed men were men who had acquired tattoos in the service during World War Two, followed by men who had otherwise acquired them in the service.  Marine Corps bulldogs wearing Brodie helmets, for example, were pretty common.  Or just U.S.M.C.  But for those men. I.e., if you saw on one of those tattoos you didn't ask about it, you could be pretty certain that fellow had really seen some awful stuff.

You also saw other service tattoos, like tigers on the forearm, on younger men.  That didn't mean as much.  I recall at Ft. Sill a medical Specialist gave us a canned lecture about things to watch out for in Lawton Oklahoma, one of being tattoo parlors.  He had a fresh patch on his forearm from a fresh tattoo. . .

The other group of men you saw with tattoos were characters who had some rough association.  Guys who were in gangs.  Guys who'd been to prison. That sort of thing.

The long and the short of it is that they were badges of a type, and the type of badges they were indicated some pretty tough guys as a rule.  Most servicemen didn't have tattoos no matter what service they'd seen.  So to have a tattoo was, well, an indication that the wearer had really seen the elephant.

And maybe been stomped by it.

Indeed, certain tattoos could be read, including service tattoos.  Blue birds on the chest are the property of the 25th Infantry Division, or where.  Bulldogs with Brodie helmets are a Marine Corps tattoo.  Tigers on the forearm were an Army tattoo for some reason.

Tough guys, in other words.

Somehow this all changed.

And I don't really know how.  

It started, it seems to me, about fifteen or so years ago.  Tattoos started spreading with the college crowd at that time and, frankly, their quality improved considerably.  A lot of the older tattoos were, quite frankly, hideous.  I can recall, for example, seeing a really nice friendly guy come into a barber shop I was in with a hideous naked Statute of Liberty tattoo. Absolutely ghastly.  Nobody would get a tattoo like that now.  Todays' are much more artful.

And with the spread of the artful quality, they spread to women.

I wish they hadn't.  No beautiful women is going to be more attractive with a tattoo and no woman who feels that she needs to be adorned will be well adorned in that fashion.  Indeed, the opposite is true.  It's a detraction, for male and female, but particularly for female.  "You look beautiful just the way you are" is true. The tattoos aren't going to add to it.

Not that it matters what I think.  This trend shows no sign of abating.  Indeed, its spreading.  Classes of people who would never have gotten a tattoo earlier now routinely do.

When I was first practicing law there would have been no earthly way a lawyer would have gotten a tattoo. If he had one, I could almost guarantee he'd seen military service, and probably of the screaming horror variety, and before he became a lawyer.  Now, however, I know at least one younger, really good, lawyer who has an extensive arm tattoo.  You can't see it when he's practicing law, as he wears a long sleeve shirt, as we do. But after hours, it can't be missed.

And even one lawyer about my age that I went to law school with has one.  I don't know what the symbolism behind it is, but he became extremely involved in athletics of the iron man type and then one showed up.  My presumption is that its related to that somehow.  It's on an ankle.

And all the younger paralegals seem to have them now.  I can hardly run into one that doesn't. At one time we hoped that if they had them they weren't visible to jurors.  Now I don't worry about that as its spread so far.

And lots of women I know express an admiration and desire for them.  And indeed lots of the women I know and like now have them.

What's it all mean?  This sort of development indicates something.

Tattoos really went from an underclass thing in the 19th Century to something else in the 20th.  It entered the military from seafarers who had picked it up from the cultures they encountered.  The old association of sailors with tattoos wasn't bogus, it was a real thing.  That it went from merchant seamen to sailors and marines, to soldiers stationed in the Pacific, to soldiers in general makes quite a bit of sense. 

But how did they make the jump from men who'd been shot at, or who might get shot at, to the general public?

I don't know, but what I do know is that there's been a death of a sense of belonging in the late 20th Century that's really carried on into the 21st.  I think that explains it.

Tattoos have always been badges of a sort, along with other sorts of closely related identifiers like tribal scars.  They have always said, "I'm a member of this . . . " tribe, group or society.  Soldiers who had the bluebird tattoos, which you will still occasionally see, declared not only that they were or had been in the Army, but that they'd been in the 25th Infantry Division.  Anchors, Marine Corps bulldogs, and the like, all symbolized similar things.  At some level, I think they all do.  They all express some sort of devotion.

I think they all also express, on some subtle level, an widespread and deep dissatisfaction with modern urban life.  People don't get Walmart tattoos, for example, even if they spend a lifetime working there.  They're a cry back towards a more primitive age.

Some of that age was with us fairly recently, and indeed still is.  It wasn't all that long ago that people very strongly identified with ethnicity and culture in a way that they tend not to now.  Indeed, the irony of modern life is that the culture of American elites has worked hard in the past thirty or so years to wipe out the concept that there's really deep distinctions between individual groups of Americans, even as they've celebrated "diversity". But in celebrating "diversity", they've argued that it doesn't exist.  The diversity imagined is a shallow one with a "we're all the same in the end" solvent being washed over all of it.

In the end, however, we really aren't all the same and, moreover, we don't want to be.  We still want our group or, as a recent British historian has termed it, our "network".  Indeed, he sees networks, which are simply a group, on the rise.  I think he's likely right.  At any rate, the desire to be part of a group and not part of the urban cubicle mass is pretty strong.  The rise of tattoos in the general middle class seems to me to be part of that.

Tattooed blacksmith by illustrator F. X. Leyendecker.  F. X. Leyendecker, like his brother, was a popular illustrator of the early 20th Century before his addiction to drugs lead to suicide.  I suspect that a lot of people identify more with the figure portrayed, a blue collar working man of an earlier generation, than with their own stations in life. . . and who can blame them really?