Inked Talk

I am of the belief that most tattoos are pretty good. Not excellent, not awful. Not outstanding, not terrible. They are middle of the road. Even though I love my ink, at least one of my tattoos falls into that category. Good, but not really memorable.

Some tattoos are memorable because they are truly great. They make are the “hell yeah!” tattoos that make you want to run out and get some new ink yourself. Dan Hazelton’s Spiderman piece comes to mind for the sheer artistic value. Other tattoos are memorable for just the opposite reason: they are so awful that you seriously question the sanity of anyone who would want it. The famous “Mr. Cool Ice“is the obvious example of the big “WTF” award.

Sometimes, however, a tattoo provokes an entirely different emotion, a confusing emotion: a reaction of “is that cool? Or is that awful?” Can a tattoo be both cool and awful at the same time?

Inked Talk Readers: I present, for your consideration, the Pac Man head tattoo:

Is this awesome? Or is this horrible?  I can’t decide.

I love Pac Man. The execution is great - Ms. Pac is appropriately pixelated, and even the cherries bear just the right amount of white-pixel shine to make them look like they came straight out of 1983.

But around the hairline? She shaved her head for this. Readers, I am at a loss. I love Pac Man, I love tattoos, the art is great, but the execution, or the placement…I don’t know.  I’d love more information about this tattoo, too - I’d love to see how it looks healed and who the artist is so I can properly credit this.

A recently published study on tattoos in Australia has been cited by a number of authors as hard evidence of the end of Australians’ love affair with tattoos.  Specifically, the study by UMR Research that inspired these articles suggests that Australians of all ages find body art to be a “turn off.” Over 1000 Australians participated in the survey, and over 50% of those surveyed indicated that a tattoo on a member of the opposite sex makes them “less attractive.” Men were slightly more likely than women to indicate that a ink made someone less attractive, with 56% of men finding tattoos on women unattractive, while only 50% of women felt the same about ink on men. Only 7% of those surveyed indicated that body art makes its bearer more attractive. Survey participants ranged in age from 18 to 70.

For every trend, there is a sector of naysayers who say the trend is dead or dying, and others will even deny it is a trend at all.  Admittedly, few back up their opinions with a survey.  However, the articles hailing this study as the beginning of the end of the tattoo trend in Australia go much farther than the study itself suggests.  For example, the results of this survey don’t shed light on whether this is a change in Australians’ opinions of tattoos, or whether half of Australia’s population have always found tattoos unattractive.  It only tells us that now, at this time, about half of those surveyed found tattoos on the opposite sex to be unattractive. The survey as presented is an interesting collection of statistics, but it doesn’t go far to predict the future of tattooing in Australia.

Personally, I don’t expect to see any marked change in the tattoo industry based on these results. Nothing, not even the world’s current economic woes, have seemed to quash the popularity of tattooing in recent years.  If you are interested, here is one of the articles that cites the Australian study.

Today I noticed a group of Myspace pages dedicated to the eradication of what they call “tattoo discrimination.”  One page in particular was very well composed, with blogs about tattoo discrimination in the workplace, social discrimination, and general gripes about how people with tattoos are treated unfairly in society because of their ink.   The site sums up its mission statement by saying that “as tattooing has become more mainstream, we are still not finding work or we are forced to cover up our expressions of art and life. We need an end to the discrimination that we are forced to face on a daily basis.”

As a tattooed person, I don’t feel that way at all.  And I know I’m not alone in my sentiments, am I?

Every day, each one of us perceives the people we meet in different ways, and we draw conclusions about them based upon those perceptions.  We think things like “that blonde has a great body,” or “the new guy at work really needs to iron his shirt,” or “the waitress has fake fingernails.”  Those are all perceptions based entirely upon visual cues made in less than a moment, and we can and do draw conclusions about those people that we see based upon how they present themselves to the world.  Why wouldn’t tattoos be a part of that visual perception?  More importantly, don’t we as tattooed people accept that and perhaps even want it that way?

When you choose to tattoo your body, you are making a bold choice on a number of levels.  First and most immediately, you are choosing to inflict pain and stress upon your body for no medical purpose.  Second, you are choosing to incorporate a design in ink onto your body that will remain a part of your body for the rest of your life.  Third, you are making an alteration to your body that, if visible to the general public, will be a part of the perception that people form about you.  None of these things should be a surprise to anyone who has a tattoo.  We recognize them and accept them before even thinking about getting tattooed.

On a personal level, I would love to display my tattoos while I am at work.  I would love to get tattoos across my knuckles and on the backs of my hands.  However, I work in an extremely traditional profession, and I just don’t see that ever happening.  Frankly, I’m not sure I’d want to.  It would require such a shift in traditional thinking that it would be the ultimate mark of tattoos’ transition from the outside to the mainstream.  I don’t think I want that.  More importantly, I recognize that just as I have the right to tattoo my body, my employer has the right to say that I need to cover my tattoos while I am working.  I’d never suppose that my rights to get tattooed eclipse my employer’s rights to set out the terms of my employment, and if I did feel that way, I have the option of renegotiating those terms finding other work.  Forced “acceptance” of my tattoos in the workplace seems like a ridiculous option to me.

I don’t believe that most tattooed people want a hard and fast halt to tattoo “discrimination,” nor do I believe anything of the kind is possible.  Even if workplaces were forced to do away with dress codes that require tattoos to be covered up, that would just scratch the surface of the discrimination perceived by the group with the Myspace page.  I don’t want to force anyone to accept me.  Either they get me, or they don’t.  If they don’t, its their loss.

As one of America’s most well-known architechts, Frank Lloyd Wright may seem like an unlikely influence for tattoo designs.  However, the philosophy behind Wright’s “organic architecture” - the harmonious convergence of the natural and the artificial - actually goes hand in hand with the very concept of body art.  Some of Wright’s most recognizable and distinct work is found in the windows and doors designed and created in his more famous houses. While Frank Lloyd Wright tattoos aren’t exactly commonplace, there are some beautiful examples of these unique and amazing tattoos.

The Coonley Playhouse in Illinois features some of Wright’s most famous stained glass designs.  Even people with just a passing knowledge of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work are likely to recognize these famous pieces:

One tattoo enthusiast used the Coonley windows as a basis for an amazing upper arm piece, and the effect is quite stunning:

Wright’s Tree of Life design with its straight lines and strict symmetry is another very distinct and easily recognized piece:

While the design has been simplified, it is easy to see that the Tree of Life design was the inspiration for this upper back tattoo:

While it is clearly a gem among Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiasts, the Dana House in Springfield, Illinois is relatively lesser-known design among his major works.  Nevertheless, the Dana House may be the consummate Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie style showcase, featuring the trademarked organic components.  One Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiast found the door design of the Dana House to be an excellent inspiration for his calf tattoo:

Frank Lloyd Wright approached architechture in a way that allowed for complete harmony between the natural and the artificial, the wild and the manmade.  Well designed tattoos allow for a similar affinity between the flesh and the design.

Whether you love or hate the Suicide Girls (warning: the SG site is NOT work safe or child safe. Take the appropriate precautions before clicking!), you have to admit that there was some genius behind the concept: the website featured tattooed and pierced semi-nude girls with alternative fashion tastes and charged people for the privilege of looking at their photos. Add some interactive forums and limited original content, and the Suicide Girls website was worth the price of admission, which was a monthly fee charged to your credit card. Admittedly, Suicide Girls was essentially just a specialized softcore porn site, but quite honestly, it was a lot of fun.

Suicide Girls enjoyed relatively limited popularity until the site and some of its girls were featured on HBO’s Real Sex. Then the Suicide Girls site exploded, and with fame and fortune came a lot of drama which ultimately cost the SG site a number of their most famous girls as well as a lot of fans.

While some of the drama has died down, there is definitely something different about the current incarnation of the Suicide Girls website. Namely, the girls. A visit to the SG site today shows not the pierced, inked and dyed beauties that made the website famous. Instead, the site features regular, plain women, women you’d see at the grocery store, on the bus, or in college classes. Women who look like the women on nearly every other soft porn site on the Internet.

What happened, Suicide Girls?

Sure, there are some tattooed beauties remaining on the site, although you wouldn’t know it by looking at the site’s main page. With a few, rare exceptions, so many of the girls on the SG site look like everyone else.  Pretty, but common.

Maybe SG’s initial success was due to the fact that it was so different, and once different become mainstream it loses its edge. As things like tattoos and piercings become mainstream, the very definition of “alternative” changes. Suicide Girls certainly has changed, but its change has been to something far less extreme and far more mainstream.

I, for one, miss the old Suicide Girls.

EBay, the worldwide online auction site, allows sellers to offer their wares to an international market for a small fee. While you can find nearly anything on eBay, the site does maintain a strict list of prohibited items such as alcohol, firearms, adult novelties, food and drugs, to name a few. Most of these restrictions are related to the legality of the item being sold, or to public health and public safety. Despite the size of the auction site, which features hundreds of thousands of items worldwide at any given time, it runs a tight ship as to its prohibited items. EBay does not hesitate to cancel items that fall within the restricted item listings, and repeat offenders may find their eBay acccounts suspended.

In spite of some rather thorough prohibitions, tattoo guns and tattoo equipment remain unrestricted on eBay. In the United States, tattooing is generally regulated by the individual state, with some municipalities having their own licensing requirements. These regulations are primarily motivated by health and safety concerns. Many legitimate sellers of tattoo equipment and instructional DVDs will only sell to licensed tattoo artists, and with good reason. Without proper training on sterilization, cross-contamination and blood-born pathogens, an amateur tattoo can mean more than just bad ink: it can mean a serious health problem.

An eBay search for “tattoo kit” yields nearly 2000 results, many of which claim to include everything you need to start tattooing. Most recently, large number of these kits come from China. While the FDA does not regulate tattoo ink domestically, Chinese-made ink should give pause to even the most cavalier among the inked crowd, given the recent crisis of tainted products coming out of China.

None of the eBay auctions appear to be restricted to purchase by licensed tattoo artists, so anyone with an eBay account can purchase a kit and get to work. In fact, many of the kits include a free download or DVD of an instructional “how to tattoo” video.

Given eBay’s apparent concern for health and public safety, the lack of restriction on tattoo kits seems unusual. Perhaps it is a lack of education on eBay’s behalf, or perhaps the issue hasn’t been brought to eBay’s attention in any significant way. Of course, even if eBay was to add tattoo kits to its prohibited product list, anyone with an internet connection can still find a tattoo kit to purchase online, be it on Craigslist or another private website. However, eBay is much more accessible to a worldwide audience, and it offers payment safeguards and protections that other websites do not, making it an attractive place for buyers to go for a tattoo kit. If the tattoo community could convince eBay that the sale of tattoo kits should be restricted in some meaningful way, if not outright prohibited, at least some untrained “scratchers” would have to think long and hard about obtaining and using a tattoo kit without proper training and supervision.

For months Inked Talk has featured a number of articles on the dangers of henna tattoos that have been altered with a substance called PPD to make the tattoos look darker. The high concentration of PPD in the henna mixture causes a strong allergic reaction in a good percentage of the population. These allergic reactions can lead to a sensitization to further exposure to PPD, which is found in lower quantities in hair dye, certain textile and leather dyes, and other pigments.

Inked Talk brought the first of these articles in February of 2008. A news story from England prompted a second story about henna and PPD allergies in July. The latest article from the UK may sound like a repeat, but yet another child in Bristol was scarred badly by a Bart Simpson henna tattoo laced with PPD.

(Yes, that’s Bart Simpson scooting a towel across his backside. Not only will this boy have a scar in the form of a pop culture icon that is likely to be long since passé by the time he gets into high school, but he has one of the tackier Bart images that he could have chosen. Poor kid.)

You can read the full article here.

Regular Inked Talk readers know that I get up on a soap box over PPD at every opportunity, so I don’t want to beat a dead horse too badly today. However, if you must have a henna tattoo, or if for some reason you feel you must have one applied to a child, be absolutely certain that the tattoo artist does not use henna laced with PPD. The good henna tattoo artists - and there are many - are well aware of the dangers of PPD and wouldn’t think of applying PPD to the skin. Talk to the artist first, ask questions, and proceed only if you feel comfortable with the answers.

Recent statistics have suggested that one in four adults aged 18-30 have a tattoo. As tattoos have become more mainstream, laser tattoo removal procedures have likewise made great strides, and the result is more people having tattoos removed now than ever before.

A study led by Myrna Armstrong of Texas Tech University suggests that women are more likely than men to undergo laser tattoo removal. Armstrong’s team visited tattoo removal clinics Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts and Texas to find out who was undergoing tattoo removal procedures, and why. Armstrong’s study consisted of just 196 people.

Above photo: tattoo removal in progress, courtesy of http://www.immortalimagestattoo.com

Sixty-six men and 130 women were interviewed for the study. In addition to demographic information, they answered questions about why they got the their tattoos, and why they were seeking removal. The most popular reasons for getting a tattoo were to commemorate an occasion and to feel “unique” and “independent.”

Women who were white, single, college-educated and between the ages of 24 and 39 were the most likely to seek removal of their tattoos. Their reasons for removal included suffering embarrassment from the tattoo, lowering of body image, getting a new job or career, having problems with clothes, and experiencing stigma. While men reported some of the same problems, they did not appear to suffer the same external pressure that women did. This led the researchers to conclude that society may be less supportive of women’s tattoos.

This author has to add her two cents to that conclusion. Anyone who has taken a basic statistics class knows the phrase “correlation does not equal causation.” In other words, an apparent correlation between two things does not suggest that one causes the other. My favorite pop culture example of this is the famous “Pirates vs. Global Warming” chart:

The chart shows that as the number of pirates has decreased, the average global temperature has increased. While the chart is comedic, it illustrates the point that just because two appear to have a correlation, you cannot conclude that one causes the other.

So what does this have to do with Armstrong’s study on tattoo removal?

The conclusion that societal pressures lead to women seeking tattoo removal more often than men is misplaced. Simply because more women cite societal pressure for tattoo removal doesn’t mean that societal pressure towards women is the cause. What about tattoo placement? Are women more likely to get a tattoo that isn’t easily concealed in the workplace? Or perhaps the societal pressure is equal among the sexes, but women are more likely to succumb to that pressure.

Or perhaps there is another explanation entirely.

While Armstrong’s sample size for this study may be too small to be conclusive, perhaps a more interesting study would have examined the correlation between the reason for initially getting the tattoo and its ultimate reason for removal. Perhaps women are more likely to get a tattoo that is relatively meaningless to them to start with, thus making the decision to have it removed less monumental and more akin to a change of wardrobe.

Armstrong’s study, while interesting, is just the beginning. A larger sample size and questions that examine the relationship between the reason for the tattoo in the first place and the reason for its removal may be more telling.

Writer Dan Kline’s July 8, 2008 column discusses what he feels is the overuse of the American flag on everyday products - clothing, bandanas, and of course tattoos. While he acknowledges that the patriotic intentions may be benevolent, the use of the American Flag on anything but a flag is inappropriate and perhaps even disrespectful. From his article:

I hardly think tattoos, bikinis, bandannas and the like actually show respect for what the flag stands for. If you respect the flag as a symbol representative of all that we love about America, than fly it properly, salute it when you walk by and think regularly of the men and women who died for your freedom.

I have to disagree with Mr. Kline’s assessment of the American Flag tattoo, for a number of reasons.

For many of our men and women in the armed forces, a tattoo is a rite of passage, a symbol of their time and experiences serving this country. What better emblem for such a tattoo than the American flag - the symbolic embodiment of the very freedoms that they serve to protect? I’m not about to tell a Marine that his American Flag tattoo isn’t an appropriate tribute to his nation.

September 11, 2001 had a huge impact on all Americans, and it inspired great patriotism among our citizens. Some people chose to get patriotic tattoos to memorialize the day. I certainly wouldn’t call those permanent reminders of a day that has been burned into our collective memories an inappropriate use of the flag. And I’m certainly not going to lump those beautiful tributes in with the “American Flag Underwear” the author jokes about in his article.

I think the author makes the mistake of thinking that a tattoo is just a fashion accessory, like the bandanas and swimsuits that he references in his column. Perhaps that is true for some people, but many more choose their tattoos because they represent something significant to them. And to many, the flag is those most significant symbol in their lives.

Readers, what are your thoughts?

I feel a little bit dumber every time I accidentally catch a few moments of TMZ or other celebrity-centric shows. It is as though my brain cells, one by one, commit seppuku, and I can’t say I blame them entirely. Today I visited TMZ.com for the first time because I had seen a link for a gallery of celebrity’s “Dumb Tattoos.” While I don’t favor coverage of celebrity tattoos, dumb celebrity tattoos could certainly be fun. I thought I’d be seeing a lot of bad ink, which admittedly there were a few “WTF” tattoos in the gallery. But the vast majority of the pictures were just tattoo photos, or worse: tattooless photos.

I guess this is why I don’t understand TMZ.

Sure, there were a few bad tattoos in the gallery. Everyone’s favorite whipping girl Britney has some faded looking dice on her wrist. Maybe she could fix those up when she’s done being nuts.

But on the next page they proceed to use this photo to mock Angelina Jolie’s tattoos:

I feel like I’m playing a game of “Where’s Waldo?”. What tattoo are they mocking in that picture? I don’t see it. Well…maybe that was a mistake. Certainly Angelina has tattoos - there are certainly enough pictures of them on other websites - but why use a picture featuring zero tattoos to mock someone’s tattoos? Maybe I’m missing something…perhaps those brain cells that died the last time I caught TMZ on television were the brain cells in charge of visual recognition of tattoos. Then again, it could just a fluke, a solitary mistake in their otherwise quality gallery.

No, wait, there are more invisible tattoos to mock.

A quick web search tells me that Mena Suvari has a tattoo on her back. So clearly this frontal picture is an excellent choice to mock her tattoo.

Maybe I’m not the one with the dying brain cells here.

And here’s another gem from their “bad tattoo” gallery:

Hmm. Maybe that goofy looking facial hair is really a tattoo?

I’m the last person you’d see criticizing another website on this blog because my purpose here is to talk ink, not to bash other sites. But dammit TMZ, don’t tease me by proclaiming to have a whole gallery of bad celebrity ink only to show me more generic pictures of Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp.

Ah well. Thanks for reading.

-Jenn

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