And the nothing I did was not getting a tattoo. Apparently, all the kids aren’t doing it now. At least according to this bit in the Graun. In Australia in 1998, men were three times more likely to have pierced ears than tattoos. Now, pierced ears among men are relatively rare.
Funny enough, I never got ink except for one drunken night in the barracks; someone did a jailhouse pen ink tattoo on me that thankfully didn't take. If I remember right, the fella used a sewing needle wrapped in thread and soaked with ink from a broken-open Skilcraft USGI pen. I don't even remember WTF it was, and I'm glad it disappeared almost as fast as my hangover.
Since then, I've been tempted, but never did it. This is probably due to lingering memories of my Grandpa and Uncle Bob, who scored a Lady Luck tattoo in some seedy bar in Honolulu before their respective combat deployments. I remember sitting in a very straight-laced evangelical church next to Bob and looking at Lady Luck's boobs, her naked form wrapped for the rest of his life around a bayonet on his forearm. Struck me as odd back then, and I decided to spare my kids that particular experience.
Postscript: Bob is still alive (Korea, 1953), and his tattoo has gone entirely black with advanced age. No more boobs; instead, it looks like a massive melanoma. So, I'm glad I didn't do that.
I don't think it's the old farts being covered in them so much as they're expensive and young people have student debts, precarious employment, no hope of secure housing and other cost of living stuff that means getting a tatt is a luxury they literally can't afford.
A sign that the apocalypse has been delayed. When I was in college (late 70’s), the only people who had tattoos were veterans with interesting stories about that night in Saigon, Bangkok etc. when they got tattooed.
This does not include the old guys from WW2, mostly Navy and Marine vets.
I fancied getting one in my early 20s, which would have been pretty radical in the 80s for a nice middle class girl, but I couldn't come at the pain. Twenty years later my contemporaries started to acquire roses in the smalls of their backs and I thought 'yeah, nah'.
Now that everyone and their dog is covered in them I'm quite glad to be a cleanskin.
i also am ink free. Also like Jason i've been tempted - have been seriously considering getting representations of my favourite birds from the garden. But time, money and being genx i'd probably be forgotten in the chair before they got to me :)
I get Jason Murphy is a journalist and economist. He lives in Melbourne, but this reads like a think piece dreamed up on a Friday afternoon, thrown together from a single stat (the one about tattoos vs body piercings which this linked article states was 1 in 8 had piercings in the survey) and the rest idle musings. I realise the unrelenting maw of 24/7 media requires constant content and The Guardian is no less immune to its insatiable desire than the Murdoch press but still.
My favorite bit is the correction at the bottom of the article setting the record for Punk. "This article was corrected on 7 January 2024. An earlier version stated punk was born in the 1980s".
Having a pathological fear of needles has rendered me free of piercings and tatts…..alone among my generation of family members. And two sons. And my niece….
Funny enough, I never got ink except for one drunken night in the barracks; someone did a jailhouse pen ink tattoo on me that thankfully didn't take. If I remember right, the fella used a sewing needle wrapped in thread and soaked with ink from a broken-open Skilcraft USGI pen. I don't even remember WTF it was, and I'm glad it disappeared almost as fast as my hangover.
Since then, I've been tempted, but never did it. This is probably due to lingering memories of my Grandpa and Uncle Bob, who scored a Lady Luck tattoo in some seedy bar in Honolulu before their respective combat deployments. I remember sitting in a very straight-laced evangelical church next to Bob and looking at Lady Luck's boobs, her naked form wrapped for the rest of his life around a bayonet on his forearm. Struck me as odd back then, and I decided to spare my kids that particular experience.
Postscript: Bob is still alive (Korea, 1953), and his tattoo has gone entirely black with advanced age. No more boobs; instead, it looks like a massive melanoma. So, I'm glad I didn't do that.
I don't think it's the old farts being covered in them so much as they're expensive and young people have student debts, precarious employment, no hope of secure housing and other cost of living stuff that means getting a tatt is a luxury they literally can't afford.
A sign that the apocalypse has been delayed. When I was in college (late 70’s), the only people who had tattoos were veterans with interesting stories about that night in Saigon, Bangkok etc. when they got tattooed.
This does not include the old guys from WW2, mostly Navy and Marine vets.
I fancied getting one in my early 20s, which would have been pretty radical in the 80s for a nice middle class girl, but I couldn't come at the pain. Twenty years later my contemporaries started to acquire roses in the smalls of their backs and I thought 'yeah, nah'.
Now that everyone and their dog is covered in them I'm quite glad to be a cleanskin.
i also am ink free. Also like Jason i've been tempted - have been seriously considering getting representations of my favourite birds from the garden. But time, money and being genx i'd probably be forgotten in the chair before they got to me :)
I get Jason Murphy is a journalist and economist. He lives in Melbourne, but this reads like a think piece dreamed up on a Friday afternoon, thrown together from a single stat (the one about tattoos vs body piercings which this linked article states was 1 in 8 had piercings in the survey) and the rest idle musings. I realise the unrelenting maw of 24/7 media requires constant content and The Guardian is no less immune to its insatiable desire than the Murdoch press but still.
My favorite bit is the correction at the bottom of the article setting the record for Punk. "This article was corrected on 7 January 2024. An earlier version stated punk was born in the 1980s".
To many scars for tatts
Having a pathological fear of needles has rendered me free of piercings and tatts…..alone among my generation of family members. And two sons. And my niece….