Seeing tattoos makes me feel physically sick
An anonymous mother has confided on the parenting platform Mumsnet that she is “devastated” by her 26-year-old daughter’s tattoos. Already decorated with numero
Archive
Seeing tattoos makes me feel physically sick
Ubiquity of body art is born out of an existential crisis of humanity in the post-religious worldMelanie Phillips
Monday February 07 2022, 9.00pm GMT, The Times
An anonymous mother has confided on the parenting platform Mumsnet that she is “devastated” by her 26-year-old daughter’s tattoos. Already decorated with numerous body inkings, her daughter showed her mother her new “sleeve” — tattoos covering her whole arm.
The mother wrote: “It’s big, black, bold and bloody awful. I’ve cried over it/her in private! I’ve read up about parents’ reactions to our kids’ tattoos. And we are supposed to be happy that they are expressing themselves. But I’m struggling with that.”
Was her reaction unreasonable, she asked. Some mothers sympathised with her and said they would also be heartbroken. Others, however, accused her of being intrusive, judgmental and weird. “Our bodies are a temple,” said one, so “why not decorate them” with “beautiful art carried on our skin”?
My own reaction to tattoos is visceral. They make me feel physically sick. It’s not so much disapproval as a profound revulsion. Whatever form they take — cute animals, flowery words, abstract swirls of pattern — they are far from being decorative or artistic.
The psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, who has long written with professional concern about the prevalence of tattoos, describes them in an article in The Critic as “body kitsch” and likens attempts to justify them philosophically to “trying to find great poetry in Hallmark cards”.
The analogy is surely an insult to Hallmark cards. At least those aren’t meant to be anything other than disposable images.
The reason tattoos seem so brutalising is that they embody a kind of desecration, the corruption of something that is pure, precious and the very quintessence of integrity: the body with which we are all born. If our bodies are a temple, it’s because we hold them sacred. As the housing to what religious people would call the soul and the non-religious would eulogise as selfhood, any mutilation of the body — including self-disfigurement — is surely a violation of the supposedly treasured self.
Viewing tattoos as an art form means treating the body as a canvas, as something of minimal value except as a means to an end. The body is effaced by an image etched into it, and in the process something of our humanity is obliterated.
The strange thing is that tattooing goes against the fetish for the natural and unspoilt. On its website, the tellingly named No Regrets tattoo studio in London declares: “We are passionate about moving towards a more sustainable way of working and now use vegan inks exclusively.” Maybe it should rename itself No Irony. For the sustainability of un-despoiled human skin is what it’s in business to destroy.
Tattoos were once confined to rough sorts such as navvies, convicts or soldiers. Yet strangely, in a feminised culture where masculine characteristics are held to be affront to civilisation, tattoos have become vogueish unisex adornments.
Indeed, they have even become couture items. A couple of years ago a blogpost on Documenting Fashion, a website associated with the Courtauld, remarked that models on the catwalk in Paris that month had sported “highly visible tattoos” covering their faces, necks, legs and arms. This kind of “body modification”, wrote the author, brought “a sense of endurance and devotion” to fashion, and was “like constructing a second skin of your own” which, as opposed to the clothes we wear, “was unchanging and everlasting”.
It is baffling, however, that tattoos are considered an aesthetic enhancement. Why has David Beckham, once the Adonis of the football pitch, sought to conceal his magnificent physique beneath tattoos which have increasingly obscured much of his skin by such tacky ugliness?
Although tattoos go back to ancient cultures, they became a social taboo around a century ago. The lifting of this taboo seems to be yet another example of our culture adopting what was previously transgressive as normal and desirable.
As some over-60s (even!) from Bexhill-on-Sea were quoted as saying last December, they had recently been tattooed because of “being able to do what I like” and “this is my body, I don’t care what anybody else thinks”.
A deeper explanation is that tattoos represent a desperate desire for distinctiveness in a culture which remorselessly drills us in our cosmic insignificance. We’re told we’re nothing more than atoms of matter randomly assembled to pursue an existence which has no meaning beyond chemical accident.
Because we no longer believe that being human is anything special, some of us try to make ourselves unique by etching artificial meaning into our skin. Yet all that does is advertise our own lack of intrinsic value as human beings.
The existential crisis of humanity in the post-religious West would seem to be a plausible explanation for the ubiquity of tattooing.
While 30 years ago the percentage of tattooed adults would have been very small, it now approaches a third in the younger generation. The French newspaper Libération, writes Dalrymple, has reported that professional tattooists in France have increased from 400 to 4,000 in a decade, and now want to be officially recognised as a profession, like accountants or notaries.
The vandalising of the self is not skin-deep. If the outer manifestation of what we are is so casually trashed, what’s inside can equally casually be cast aside. If we really believe we are living in a kinder, gentler society, the fashion for tattoos is hardly its most conspicuous advertisement.
