The darker the ink the more it hurts, however if you apply the expensive recommended creams beforehand it is very bareable, anyone can endure a 20 minute removal session.
Pretty much if you could do the tattoo you can get it removed, first times hurt a bit but I have vague memories that it hurt like hell when I got it done black-out drunk in Aiya Napa, Cyprus as an 18 year old as well.
If you're thinking about removing a tattoo pain should be really low on your list of considerations, I genuinely mean it (both because sessions are short and it doesn't hurt much)
If there is anything that's a constant in life, it's that nothing is a constant. Tattoos have a permanence that is rarely matched by one's character - many people don't seem to realise that.
You know, as much as I want to agree, it feels a bit shallow to look at life that way. I've got tattoos, sometimes people ask me "What does this represent to you?" and honestly I never really know what to say because I don't overthink them. What I do remember is where I was, what I was doing, and my whole vibe back then. It's a cool reminder that nothing stays the same and that I'm a different person now. It's kind of like asking your grandpa the story behind a scar he has.
Now lately I feel like the speed on which trends are born and die, the non-stop over sharing, and that constant itch for "what's next" is really pushing us all to become these kind of formless blobs, scared to show any real "edges." For example:
- Cars all kinda look the same now and are mostly some shade of grey. Same deal with phones and pretty much all tech.
- Buying clothes with bland colors with almost no originality with the expectation that it will probably be in the bin the next season.
- The whole clean girl aesthetic on putting in a ton of effort to look like you put in zero effort.
- And don't get me started on how sad beige parenting is not a joke
You only live once, there's no scoreboard at the end. Just do what you want with your life. More often than you'd probably like to admit, nobody really cares that much anyway.
I got my tattoo when I was about half my current age. I wasn't too worried about not liking it later -- I'd wanted the idea for a few years, and I figured that it'd be a good memory if I changed later.
I didn't change later. I had another artist expand the design about ten years ago. And while it had some meaning when I got the first round, I've realized over time that it means a whole lot more to me as I've learned more about myself.
But when someone asks me what it means, I just shrug it off. I'm not sharing that kind of thing with people.
I agree with you about overthinking, but the second half of your comment is very broad-brush. If you went back in time to any era of vehicles or other artistic objects, you'd find they all had a similar feel reminiscent of the era. There are plenty of cool modern cars/clothes/etc.! For example, look at Toyota with their wacky 3 cylinder turbo AWD Gazoo Racing Corolla or Hyundai with their angular Ioniq. I will say the arms race going on re: vehicle height/size is a pox on car design, kind of like sealed beam headlight requirements and afterthought add-on 5mph bumpers were a pox on car design in their respective eras.
That's a bit of a non sequitur and assumes white/black/gray = boring isn't it?
> Do you disagree with that?
100%. It's all about the entire package, of which color is only part. Aesthetics are always subjective, but, for example, the Ioniq I mentioned definitely (subjective :P) looks best in gray.
I approach it the same way. My tattoos don't "mean" anything, and honestly I find the ones that have "meaning" to not be that great. My tattoos do remind me of where I was in my life. I also stick to American traditional style since they tend to age pretty well.
>> It's kind of like asking your grandpa the story behind a scar he has
I'm old enough to be a grandpa for many of the people here, I've got a lot of scars, and none of those scars are from going to a scar store, getting out my wallet, and saying, "hey! give me a cool scar, scar artist!".
The scars I have on my body are from moments in my life where everything went wildly fucking wrong. If you want that in your life, something is wrong with you, same as it was for me, and I don't what to tell you other than you don't have to pay money for it. You can get scar tissue for free.
I was a member of a group at church that was populated mostly by old retired White men. And many of them were veterans of various military services. They were not the kind of guy who tooted their own horns. They often struggled with various disabilities.
One fellow I was very close with, had served in Vietnam, and had significant pieces of shrapnel/flak embedded in his skull that they couldn't pick out. He sometimes had minor memory lapses and PTSD bad enough to require sleep medication, every night.
Another fellow was doing well and had a construction job still, but noticeable scarring all along his forearms. And he never made a big deal about it or anything, until once we were all gathered for a meal, and our pastor pointed out that this fellow had run back into a burning building to rescue someone and his arms were set on fire from that incident, and he sustained significant damage to them, but in the end it was indeed an act of heroism and unselfish bravery to save another human being.
It was very humbling to be given this new perspective on guys whom I barely knew. There is definitely a story behind every scar on someone's body. Some of those stories may be quite eye-opening!
Yeah when people ask me what my tattoos mean I give the truthful answer - owls are cool as hell, I like the horror/skull aesthtic, gas masks look badass etc.
This is why I likely will never get a tattoo of any kind, other than the fact that I simply have no desire for one. Some people become themselves early in life, but I feel like I different person every year that goes by. I don't even like the kinds of clothes I used to wear not that long ago, so I know I would soon hate any tattoo I'd get.
It all depends. I got a couple of tattoos 20 years ago and I’m not that guy. But seeing those tattoos connects me to who I used to be, and even if I wouldn’t go get them now, I could never regret them.
It also helps that my tattoos are wholly original, i.e. not based on some trend, and that I chose the subject matter specifically because I didn’t think it was possible to hate it later on (a dinosaur and a 4d hypercube). Like, am I ever going to hate dinosaurs? I’ve loved them for 40ish years already.
I feel the same way about my self-inflicted scars. People who do not have one do not like to talk about it, but there can be beauty in them, in a way. It is kind of a taboo, I would say.
I kind of want a tattoo because I'd like to know what it feels like to get one. I don't think I'll ever get one though. I have a hard enough time deciding what kind of art to hang on my walls.
You can get one that's only visible under UV light, but given the topic here it might be relevant to know that these are much harder to remove and also if they age they may become visible under normal light and/or stop fluoresced under UV light.
I got a ‘meaningful’ tattoo on my 18th birthday. I don’t fully relate to it with the same passion 20 years later. I still like it though for different reasons. It’s a snapshot of who I was and what I stood for when I got it. Tbh I don’t regret it at all and mostly forget I even have the thing. I think I’m lucky to have a mindset to appreciate that permanence, a lot of people end up regretting ‘meaningful’ tattoos once they lose their meaning.
I knew a man who had been in the Navy, in the Pacific, during WW2. Not many men of his generation had tattoos, but most of the ones who did were sailors, and he was no exception. Large tattoo on his forearm: a jester, with the hat and bells, like from a deck of cards.
I knew another man of that generation with a number tattooed on his wrist. He never talked about it.
None of the millennials I know who got tatted during the height of the fashion wave match the character* of being tattooed. And some of them really went all out. Truly amazing what the desire to conform to our tribe will make us do to ourselves.
(*statistically a drug addict, criminal or prostitute)
Maybe I shouldn't be telling on myself like this, but I think tattoos look really cool and the only reason I'm not getting one is because how many people look down on them.
I think for some people, at least myself, tattoos are a narrative, it's such a bizarre process, half art and half science, that each session, wether it was in a punk house with no electricity or an upscale art gallery on the other side of the world gets ingrained a little deeper. They're like little time machines, I can remember who I was, where I was, who I was with. And I'm guessing I'm in the minority here, but I can't stand the look of a fresh clean tattoo, the stick and poke in a dorm room, the 20 year old one done in a studio that wasn't too concerned with checking ids, the one that was done way too deep, in the dark, and healed into a puff sticker like scar consistency, that's what I love. I've considered a few times going in and getting some of my more visible ones removed, and the occasional must wear long sleeved shirt wins every time, no matter what I gain or lose, I like my garbage art time machines
I got inked twice before I made a commitment to my third tattoo on my wrist so it would be plainly visible. I committed to never working with or for someone who refused to hire a person because of something like a tattoo. Sometimes the commitment goes beyond the ink on the skin.
The idea that your character is able to be quantized to a moment in time instead of the history of your life is bizarre to me.
For the vast majority of people who haven’t suffered some kind of brain damage, life is append only and the current state is completely dependent on the history. You have markers of your past good and bad decisions all over you.
It depends on one's outlook. I know people who's attitude is both "boy that was a dumb tattoo to get at 18" and "dumb 18 year old me is still me, and I don't want to remove that tattoo any more that I want to remove that part of myself".
Obviously circumstances may change if the tattoo is offensive.
Your second perspective captures my personal take. I feel indifferent about the actual ink at this point. It’s more about a personal/symbolic mark of who I am, who I was, maybe who I’ll be - all the same person. No regrets.
I don't have tattoos because I could never commit to having any specific image permanent on my skin. I have considered getting a public key tattooed though.
Yup, that's what all my tattoos are. They're markers of things I've done, experiences had, and mistakes made.
If when I get older and those memories mean less to me, the tattoos will become markers of who I was and what was once important to me. I could see myself getting some of them removed, but I don't think it's likely.
Because of the way my brain is, it's difficult for me to stay attached to the past. Having permanent marks on my body makes the past unforgettable, inescapable. I like to think it's made an improvement on the person I've become, but of course it's impossible to know.
And I only recently got my first tattoo around 40. Not sure this article makes it clear what is driving this trend? Tattoos come and go out of style even in my own life (when i was young to young adult, it was bad, then it was good, now seemingly bad again). If I don’t like my tattoo in 20 years I really don’t care, you can always replace it with more work if it fades. Probably will get more. It isn’t very expensive. It’s a form of expression I can’t really get anywhere else - I like looking at my tattoo and dont particularly care what anyone thinks of it.
This, back in the days having a tatoo was a symbol of rebellion against a norm. Now that everyone and his mother is law has one, it has become a symbol of submission to the norm and establishment.
I'm 40 now, and have always wanted a tattoo but could never decide what I should get. I was thinking something linux or maybe vmware related because I love both of those things. Very glad I didn't get anything vmware related now!
A tattoo of proprietary software or really any company seems kind of sad and dystopian to me. Nothing against vmware in particular. I recall an old meme collage of a bunch of people with Apple tattoos that was not putting them in a favorable light.
Maybe a Sun logo could be an exception, they're not around anymore, so it feels more like nostalgia or grieving instead of "this company owns me". I wasn't around/aware when Sun was, also, so they feel more like a mythical thing from a story to me than an old company.
Same here, I want a tattoo, but can't decide what is something I care about enough to get on my skin forever.
I've kinda sorta decided on a hex/honeycomb pattern so I can fill each hex with e different thing. That would keep it consistent (can't stand the style of tattoos where they're just slapped haphazardly everywhere) but still variable enough.
> Not sure this article makes it clear what is driving this trend?
Technology improvements leading to better removal quality, reduced removal times, less post-procedure pain, and better word-of-mouth response is a suggestion.
Up until the 2010's the range of Quality(Q)-switched lasers was the main tool available. They produce pulse widths in the nanosecond range and can remove multiple colors. Big improvements over the Argon and CO2 laser systems from pre-80's / 90's with less scarring. However, often still had long, painful recoveries between sessions (depending on the tattoo).
In the 2010's, the various picosecond pulse-width laser systems came out, and they usually require less sessions than the Q-switched procedures people are used to, and the reports tend be of less pain and discomfort after the removal procedure (described like getting a bad sunburn). Probably both have resulted in better word of mouth, and larger numbers recommending getting removal.
A friend of mine tattoos in my city and we were talking about this a few weekends ago. He mentioned three related things that contribute to removals he’s aware of.
Tattooing got immensely popular and a lot of people who shouldn’t not have taken on apprentices took on apprentices. The quality of apprenticeships dropped and artists were getting put on skin way before they were ready. Many artists never learned proper technique or placement.
Styles changed so people were getting their first tattoos in visible places. When he started tattooing, artists wouldn’t do a first tattoo somewhere visible unless the client had a very very good reason. It always took dialogue. Now you can walk into a shop, point to flash and get it out on your neck or hand.
And finally, realism hit tattoos.
So in his opinion. You take a lot of artists who shouldn’t have been putting ink into grapefruits not skin. Put them to them to work on highly visible realistic looking art on people who don’t know enough about tattoo to know whether they’re making a mistake. And you end up with a lot of people staring at visible art that didn’t heal properly, with blown out lines and poor placement.
I didn’t get tattooed until after another good friend had finished his apprenticeship- I’m very glad I waited because I love my art and will slowly keep getting more. But I feel bad for people who fell into that trap of getting an unqualified artist to put bad art on their bodies.
My grandma used to have a copy of "The Sneetches" by Dr. Suess I read as a kid. A guy rolls into town and convinces all the sneetches critters that they ought to have a star put on their stomach to be special with a machine he built. Then when everyone gets one they don't feel special so he offers a machine to remove them. Chaos ensues.
This is one of my favorite stories, because you realize later how many things in life this applies to. Once the 'others' start doing something, the originals don't do it anymore! You see it in everything from food menus, to devices, to clothes, etc.
It used to be that tattoos were a marker of some combination of lower class, military, sports, etc. But you'd pretty much never see them in general on most middle/upper-class professionals. That changed with developers etc. over the past couple decades. Not shocking that might reverse. Not personal commentary but just an observation.
I think society's attitude towards people with tattoos ebbs and flows over time too. I think with the recent political happenings we might be in a bit of an ebb.
Watch An Officer and a Gentleman sometime. (Pretty decent movie.) There's a scene where the Richard Gere character shows up to training (I guess) and he has a tattoo covered up. As I recall the drill sergeant rips the bandage off and basically mocks him for it with the implication being that officers don't have tattoos.
I think a majority, perhaps nearly all, of my daughter's friends have tattoos (early 20s). Not huge ones... a little flower on the ankle, etc. This is in the Pacific Northwest, though. They really got big here, to the point I agree it's a little rebellious of a young person to not get a tattoo.
There's probably a lot of intersection. Don't really disagree. Though counter-culture folks I went to school with in engineering/etc. still didn't tend to have tattoos.
I really like my tattoos but this is why I've chosen to have them in easily covered areas.
Tattoos say different things to different people in different times. Right now tattoos are fine in most white collar settings but this won't always be the case.
Yea, their objective is to optimize labor costs and increase profit margins. It is an objective that is diametrically opposed to our well being in the long run.
Don't confuse a state of affairs where the capitalists are having difficulty replacing us (thus reducing pressure on us) with a general beneficence, their relationship to us is purely transactional and we are disposable. Have solidarity with your class.
I got a tattoo to cover a birth mark a while ago. I used to be nervous about people seeing the mark before, now I enjoy people looking at my tattoo instead.
I think tattoos are cool because it's art where your body is the canvas. Pure human evolution really. I'll be getting more tattoos soon.
During the height of my adolescence, I had pretty bad acne and jokingly wanted to get a constellation tattoo connecting the pock marks to distract from it.
Flat birthmarks are fine. I was told you can’t tattoo over raised ones, although I suspect this might be more about detecting skin cancer than anything else.
Yea my tattoo artist told me that some skin surfaces can't be tattooed but mine was just a weird looking pattern. Could be about skin cancer or macrophages that feed on the ink.
I've seen a video of one person doing birth mark tattoos with pigment that matches their skin color to effectively disappear them. I'm sure if you got a tan or something they would look like a color negative of the originals but for casual appearance that might be something worth looking into.
I got it covered but I thought about getting a more elaborate design at some point. I wanted something minimalist as my first tattoo to see how it does. Now that I like tattoos I'm gonna experiment more in the future.
It's definitely doable and could be a boost in confidence for some people, like it was for me.
It seems like the market has filled up with body art that fits someplace between permanent tattoos and the little toy temporary tattoos that are basically stickers. Stuff that lasts for weeks, months, or years before fading away. Encouraging people to try those out first before committing to something permanent would be wise.
It turns out that those ephemeral tattoos did not fade out in time and are extremely problematic when trying to laser remove them. The company that originally started that tech is gone, and the "ephemeral" tattoos they created are still around.
The article touches on this only briefly at the end, but I wonder whether the popularity of tattoos is beginning to wane. After more than a decade of a cultural embrace of tattoos, we could be starting to see the fashionability of tattoos decline (and then I'm sure it'll be back in a couple decades).
But this is also why face tattoos are more popular. Face tattoos are still considered “hardcore” of whatever. Before just having a tattoo anywhere made you an outsider. But then emo happened and everything that was cool was commoditized and now the modern world is the way it is. Or something. I don’t know how you feel but I think we should blame the world on emo.
Mike Tyson's is very clean, but personally I just don't like "tribal" tattoos unless you're Maori or part of a cultural that does them. They seem more cohesive somehow.
Having a well-made tattoo is one thing. But most of the kids with tattoos these days seem to just have a bunch of random small tattoos sprinkled all over with no discernible rhyme or reason, and that I just don't get.
That said, I'm old enough that most of those could be my kids, so I realize I'm an old fart at this point.
One good one I heard is that before you get a tattoo, go to the local water park. You'll have ample time waiting in line to look at what your hypothetical tattoo, or a close enough one, will look like on all sorts of bodies and skins.
If you like 'em get one. If you don't like it later, remove it. Sounds good to me. I always take ideas to the extreme to see if they still make sense. It seems like over time tattoos are becoming less permanent and it isn't inconceivable that they could become exceptionally transient meaning add/remove at will (or even become 'live' interactive displays). Does that change their meaning or value? Some people wear a belt buckle or jewelry for decades because of sentimental value even though they can easily change things. I suspect in a future where this is easy/normal we will see even more variety, expression and meaning.
If there were microdot e-ink tattoos (whatever their equivalent would be in human machine interface systems, anyway) I would strongly consider getting one. You can do a lot with a 64x64 matrix especially if you can change it with a usb powered overlay device or like a laser at a specific light frequency or something.
Multiple members of my family have tattoos or brands. I've just never felt the need to permanently mark my body like that, so I feel like I'm considered somewhat boring or vanilla for not getting one myself. Of course, they don't know that I'll be first in line should novel in-vitro genetic manipulation technology become available. We'll start with growing a tail and work from there. Turns out, when it comes to body mods, I'm less, "Ew," more, "Go big or go home."
When I was leaving for the navy, the last thing my mom said was, "don't get a tattoo." I never did but that was in 1981, maybe half a decade before tattoos and body piercings started becoming a mainstream thing.
It seems mostly like induced demand from the equipment being cheap and readily available these days. People have always regretted their tattoos after getting older, but it was never a thing in the 90s or 2000s to just go down to a local clinic and have it done for a few hundred bucks. It was something you just heard about rich/famous people doing every now and then.
I live above a tattoo shop with a big window that people get tattoo'd in so everyone on the street walking by can see. I've been calling it the window of future regrets.
I've looked into getting my tattoos removed after reading about Pete Davidson, of all people.
Then I looked into it, and it seems to be pretty hit or miss. Some people have great outcomes, some people end up with something that looks even worse than what they started with. It can take years for the removal process, and you won't know if you're going to end up with a good or bad result until the end.
That doesn't even touch on the price.
So, for me, I'm just going to cover mine up, and accept that I've only got a few more decades with them anyway.
Tattoos, a common form of body adornment, have been associated with numerous cutaneous complications. These include not only benign neoplasms and malignant tumors but also lymphoid conditions occurring within the tattoo.
> "Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002.
> Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
Great article, thanks for sharing. Though what I liked about it has nothing to do with tattoos.
Towards the end he talks about how people trusted blogs and online content more because mainstream media was fake and biased.
The final paragraph:
> PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.
This is where we are now. It's even worse, I guess. Publishing online is essentially free, so they don't really have to try hard. And we are left with the work of separating the wheat out of this tsunami of chaff. The future of the Internet looks bleak TBH.
If those tattoo's had meaningful sentiment for the owner, and you knew that sentiment, would you view that person different than a "fashionista tattoo seeker" ?
edit : I have a few tattoo's my first at 18, my best friend killed himself, so I took his scratch he made on his guitar and make a tattoo. it's not astetic by any means but now I build a collection of memories of the people important to me who are around and meld them all together.
I like this, means the most to me. Can look horrible to others. But tattoos are not all born equal.
You are right and my answer is yes. (I elaborated my thought in another reply under my parent comment; the essence being that tattoos with the function of fashion likely lead to regret, while other tattoos don't.)
It's just having the maturity to realize that you don't have to stop having fun just because you're getting older
It's also important to have the maturity to realize that there is a time and place for embracing your inner child
I have a tattoo of a sword buried in molten rock on my bicep. It was kind of inspired by the bonfire from Dark Souls. I don't tend to go around showing it off at work events or whatever.
I absolutely do not regret it even though it is admittedly kind of a childish tattoo. I think it's cool. I show it off to people that I think will also think it's cool
I tried to not make an all inclusive statement, thus formulating it as "Tattoos as fashion", as I do recognize there are people happy with their tattoos, thus not subject to regret.
What I tried to get at, but wasn't clear about, is that tattoos serve a functional purpose (in your case it seems to partly be an identifier).
Then, specifically, tattoos with the function of fashion, is what likely leads to regret by the general laws of fashion. To quote "Project Runaway": "one day you're in, the next day you're out."
I think social media has done what it does best, skewing people perspective. Look up almost any tattoo artist on social media and you'll see a portfolio of beautiful work. Artists never post their bad tattoos (Ariel DeJesus excluded). It makes it seem like everyone is giving and getting amazing tattoos. Then when someone gets a tattoo and it's just average, they are disappointed.
I've never gotten tattoos, and it's in part due to the fact nobody I respected growing up had them. People act like they're ubiquitous but tattoos are still a class signifier, and you can still miss out on jobs or other opportunities if an employer sees your tattoo(s).
I am thinking what all that stuff written and drawn on people should tell me?
I cant even talk to them while commuting, they only stare in their phones.
What is it my business when the litte daughter was born or a half readable scribbling above the boobs is there?
I dont get many tatoos, some of them you see around the world in the same manner.
Some are complete bullshit.
But well, as long as people have money for getting and then removing them, all is fine.
You get a tramp stamp because your drunk friends decided it was a good idea. You get a sleeve when you've thought about it for a while, and budgeted for a $1500+ expenditure. I think it's a different mindset.
The only people I know who got a sleeve lazered off did it because they wanted to replace it, not because they wanted to be ink free.
I grew up in the tattoo era (teenager in the 90s) and never got one. I just told myself to represent something, buy a tshirt. I've noticed people with tattoos love to show them off, either in person or on Youtube. Tattoos are like motorcycles, the people with them seem to think everyone cares. I do have a motorcycle so I can sense that mentality from the community.
The only thing I would possibly tattoo is something about me that will never change, for me that's my religious views. That said, my religion has mixed reviews on if tattoos are even acceptable at all, our body being a temple.
Overall, I still feel tattoos should be relegated to prisons and skid row as I'm old fashioned. I wouldn't recommend or encourage anyone to get one. People are leaning more conservative as a sign of the times. That's the root of the trend against tattoos. Even famous tattoo artists like Kat Von D has wanted to remove hers and felt she was better off blacking them out instead.
I am not sure I want to have the same painting or a poster on the wall not even for the rest of my life but for 5-10 years. Apart from maybe a tattoo with one's blood group frankly I am puzzled by the idea of getting even the most artsy-fartsy tattoo anywhere on my body.
I got my entire arm blacked out like 20 years ago, back before it became a subtrend. Back when I did it I think I had only ever seen it one other place and that was some guy featured in BME. Whenever people ask me about it I tell them the truth, which is when I did it I was obsessed with taking things to their logical extreme, and blackout to me at the time was the logical extreme of tattoo, which is covering your skin in ink. I've since had my other arm done with an extremely colourful trippy design. The contrast is immediate but the story for me is one of life stages, and not just any life stages but my life stages. I don't care what the current fashion is, they're staying.
I find it pretty damning that AI Art will not put tattoos on beautiful people(unless specifically instructed).
I think everyone knew this to be true, but we are polite to people who have tattoos.
On the flip side, there are people who claim 'I don't care what they think'. And this is just an anti-social attitude in disguise of rebellion. It genuinely doesnt matter, people make split second judgements that DO affect you, even if you claim you don't care.
I've been at busy events and decided to talk to a decently dressed person over the person wearing raggy clothing. We notice patterns, often subconsciously.
how is it anti-social to not to engage with someone whose overly judging you? seems like a pretty universal response. sure everyone has first level impressions, but I’m not going to put my energy into someone who never outgrew the child level thinking of leading head first into surface level impressions
>I’m not going to put my energy into someone who never outgrew the child level thinking of leading head first into surface level impressions
Less opportunities for you because you are (intentionally) ignorant of human nature.
As mentioned, people make split second judgements. It doesnt matter if you are the top 5 smartest people in the world, people do not have the resources to 'vet' everyone. We look at patterns and realize that people with Face tattoos are less likely to be excellent.
This is textbook idealism. That is the way the world Ought to be. That isnt how the world Is. We are shaped by experiences.
There is something a bit reinforcing on this topic. The people deliberately violating social norms claim they 'don't care'. I imagine the smartest people are aware this stuff does matter, so they don't violate social norms.
I don't have any tattoos but I'd rather be judged for something surface level than for having a belief like "let's all aspire to be the default Stable Diffusion idea of a person."
When I woke up from study-job-relationship marathon lasting 2005-2019 and looked around I realised everyone have tattoos including underage and doctors, including face tattoos. Luckily this is passing.
If the pool of people having tattoos grows (and it does), so does the total amount of people removing them.
The more interesting question is how the percentages changed — although that very likely just tells you something about the quality and availability of tattoo removal services.
When the president of El Salvador started throwing people in concentration camps based on tattoos, I said gangs will adapt and just stop getting such prominent tattoos. I wonder if that has something to do with this.
I will wait to get tattoos until the state of the art advances to a point where you can regular change them out without much hassle, and they look just like the real thing.
more people have tattoos that, given other social indicators, would probably not have gotten (as many) tattoos as they might have in the past. it's definitely been something of a fad over the last decade or so that seems to be ebbing a bit (at least according to friends of mine who tattoo - bad for them, but that's life).
we saw the same thing over a shorter period with stretched ears - a lot of people did it at the height of its popularity but have since let their piercings close (or resorted to surgery if they were past that point).
tbh, i don't really care if "squares/normies"
get tattoos or weird piercings (or get them removed), but i do kinda welcome the return to "otherness" that it used to confer. i like having tattoos and piercings for their own sake. even though 99% of my tattoos are extremely stupid and i wouldn't get them today, i'm happy to keep them as a reminder of where i was in life when i got them.
> tbh, i don't really care if "squares/normies" get tattoos or weird piercings (or get them removed)
EDIT: I think I misinterpreted your statement, but I'll leave my response anyway just because. I thought you meant "get" in the sense of understanding them.
I appreciate you saying this offhand for some reason, even though I don't think you were trying to give credit to others.
Naturally, I am both liberal and perhaps libertarian in the sense that I think people have a right to get tattoos and I don't have a problem with people having them.
What has long bugged me though are the numerous people who clearly get body modifications in order to attract validation from others. If one isn't in their unspoken club, they become super defensive and accusatory.
For example, as much as I have no interest in getting tattoos, I will compliment people on their tattoos that I appreciate. When inevitably asked in response why I don't have any tattoos, I tell the other person that I simply have no desire for one. When that answer isn't accepted, I sometimes (mistkenly) admit that I don't like them in general. This triggers a lot of tattoo people, even though my choice of words doesn't actually suggest that I hate all tattoos or their tattoos.
On an even more intense level, it's verboten in my society, as a man, to openly state a preference for women without tattoos. I never bring it up unless prompted, yet I often get so much blowback for this. The word "judgmental" always gets slung my way. It's pretty clear that something else is going on here when people get this defensive over something that is fairly trivial.
Some people like to show off their new tattoos and ask my opinion, or I will just compliment someone on a tattoo they have that caught my notice. And sometimes that leads to "You got any tattoos?" or "You ever gonna get a tattoo?"
As far as the woman thing goes, guys have a tendency to talk about women, and sometimes the topic of tattoo'd women comes up. I've been on this planet for nearly 40 years, so while this isn't really a common conversation, I've encountered it enough times to notice recurring themes.
Could be that they're understanding your preference as a normative statement. You're probably not the first person to mention how they would look better without tattoos, even if that's not exactly what you meant.
Imagine deciding in your early 20's back in the 1990's to put on that awful floral shirt and those jeans torns and ripped with paisley patches. Your mullet hairstyle, your 10 earrings.
Now that's your fashion decision for the rest of your life because you thought this is such a cool look, you'll wear it until you die.
That is absolutely how I feel about it.
And even if you don't, the world changes.
Someone I know got his band logo tattooed, a big HP. Then a decade later 'Harry Potter' becomes the iconic HP with a similar style font ....
Hilarious. I'm imagining he gets the "Michael Bolton from Office Space" experience a lot if it's somewhere on his body that's easily visible. "So who's you're favorite character?"
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned how these days having a tattoo, no matter which, is a potential one-way ticket to a prison in El Salvador. That's a very good reason to having them removed.
That only applies to non-citizens, like Garcia, and I don't think his MS-13 tattoos were the reason for his removal, he was sent home because he was here illegally and had prior charges (such as beating his wife)
I’ve had tattoos removed and currently removing two more. They are all 20 years old, very faded, blurry they honestly just didn’t look good any more.
The first removal 5 years ago would leave me bleeding and require bandage changes for a week.
The new tattoo removal lasers leave you feeling like a sun burn for two days. No blood, no bandages.
It will become way more common.
Are the new lasers very painful when applied ?
The darker the ink the more it hurts, however if you apply the expensive recommended creams beforehand it is very bareable, anyone can endure a 20 minute removal session.
Pretty much if you could do the tattoo you can get it removed, first times hurt a bit but I have vague memories that it hurt like hell when I got it done black-out drunk in Aiya Napa, Cyprus as an 18 year old as well.
If you're thinking about removing a tattoo pain should be really low on your list of considerations, I genuinely mean it (both because sessions are short and it doesn't hurt much)
If there is anything that's a constant in life, it's that nothing is a constant. Tattoos have a permanence that is rarely matched by one's character - many people don't seem to realise that.
You know, as much as I want to agree, it feels a bit shallow to look at life that way. I've got tattoos, sometimes people ask me "What does this represent to you?" and honestly I never really know what to say because I don't overthink them. What I do remember is where I was, what I was doing, and my whole vibe back then. It's a cool reminder that nothing stays the same and that I'm a different person now. It's kind of like asking your grandpa the story behind a scar he has.
Now lately I feel like the speed on which trends are born and die, the non-stop over sharing, and that constant itch for "what's next" is really pushing us all to become these kind of formless blobs, scared to show any real "edges." For example:
- Cars all kinda look the same now and are mostly some shade of grey. Same deal with phones and pretty much all tech.
- Buying clothes with bland colors with almost no originality with the expectation that it will probably be in the bin the next season.
- The whole clean girl aesthetic on putting in a ton of effort to look like you put in zero effort.
- And don't get me started on how sad beige parenting is not a joke
You only live once, there's no scoreboard at the end. Just do what you want with your life. More often than you'd probably like to admit, nobody really cares that much anyway.
I got my tattoo when I was about half my current age. I wasn't too worried about not liking it later -- I'd wanted the idea for a few years, and I figured that it'd be a good memory if I changed later.
I didn't change later. I had another artist expand the design about ten years ago. And while it had some meaning when I got the first round, I've realized over time that it means a whole lot more to me as I've learned more about myself.
But when someone asks me what it means, I just shrug it off. I'm not sharing that kind of thing with people.
I am a disembodied text, you can tell me.
I agree with you about overthinking, but the second half of your comment is very broad-brush. If you went back in time to any era of vehicles or other artistic objects, you'd find they all had a similar feel reminiscent of the era. There are plenty of cool modern cars/clothes/etc.! For example, look at Toyota with their wacky 3 cylinder turbo AWD Gazoo Racing Corolla or Hyundai with their angular Ioniq. I will say the arms race going on re: vehicle height/size is a pox on car design, kind of like sealed beam headlight requirements and afterthought add-on 5mph bumpers were a pox on car design in their respective eras.
Gray shift is real https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/j7yfqb/oc_...
That's a bit of a non sequitur and assumes white/black/gray = boring isn't it?
> Do you disagree with that?
100%. It's all about the entire package, of which color is only part. Aesthetics are always subjective, but, for example, the Ioniq I mentioned definitely (subjective :P) looks best in gray.
Do you disagree with that?
It’s much deeper than that, I think. The constant sharing actually prevents edges from forming in the first place.
People are simply less unique nowadays, full stop.
I approach it the same way. My tattoos don't "mean" anything, and honestly I find the ones that have "meaning" to not be that great. My tattoos do remind me of where I was in my life. I also stick to American traditional style since they tend to age pretty well.
>> It's kind of like asking your grandpa the story behind a scar he has
I'm old enough to be a grandpa for many of the people here, I've got a lot of scars, and none of those scars are from going to a scar store, getting out my wallet, and saying, "hey! give me a cool scar, scar artist!".
The scars I have on my body are from moments in my life where everything went wildly fucking wrong. If you want that in your life, something is wrong with you, same as it was for me, and I don't what to tell you other than you don't have to pay money for it. You can get scar tissue for free.
I was a member of a group at church that was populated mostly by old retired White men. And many of them were veterans of various military services. They were not the kind of guy who tooted their own horns. They often struggled with various disabilities.
One fellow I was very close with, had served in Vietnam, and had significant pieces of shrapnel/flak embedded in his skull that they couldn't pick out. He sometimes had minor memory lapses and PTSD bad enough to require sleep medication, every night.
Another fellow was doing well and had a construction job still, but noticeable scarring all along his forearms. And he never made a big deal about it or anything, until once we were all gathered for a meal, and our pastor pointed out that this fellow had run back into a burning building to rescue someone and his arms were set on fire from that incident, and he sustained significant damage to them, but in the end it was indeed an act of heroism and unselfish bravery to save another human being.
It was very humbling to be given this new perspective on guys whom I barely knew. There is definitely a story behind every scar on someone's body. Some of those stories may be quite eye-opening!
The Monkey's Paw: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=4S8rtxPmHTA&si=v607QuxDK11...
Yeah when people ask me what my tattoos mean I give the truthful answer - owls are cool as hell, I like the horror/skull aesthtic, gas masks look badass etc.
Not everything needs a deep meaning.
This is why I likely will never get a tattoo of any kind, other than the fact that I simply have no desire for one. Some people become themselves early in life, but I feel like I different person every year that goes by. I don't even like the kinds of clothes I used to wear not that long ago, so I know I would soon hate any tattoo I'd get.
It all depends. I got a couple of tattoos 20 years ago and I’m not that guy. But seeing those tattoos connects me to who I used to be, and even if I wouldn’t go get them now, I could never regret them.
It also helps that my tattoos are wholly original, i.e. not based on some trend, and that I chose the subject matter specifically because I didn’t think it was possible to hate it later on (a dinosaur and a 4d hypercube). Like, am I ever going to hate dinosaurs? I’ve loved them for 40ish years already.
I feel the same way about my self-inflicted scars. People who do not have one do not like to talk about it, but there can be beauty in them, in a way. It is kind of a taboo, I would say.
I kind of want a tattoo because I'd like to know what it feels like to get one. I don't think I'll ever get one though. I have a hard enough time deciding what kind of art to hang on my walls.
Don't believe the people who say it's not that bad
It hurts a ton. It bleeds a lot
It wasn't intolerable pain, but it's not "not that bad" either
Really depends on where you get it done. On your forearm? Not that bad. On your scalp? Hope you take a stick to bite down on while you get it done.
You can get one that's only visible under UV light, but given the topic here it might be relevant to know that these are much harder to remove and also if they age they may become visible under normal light and/or stop fluoresced under UV light.
I got a ‘meaningful’ tattoo on my 18th birthday. I don’t fully relate to it with the same passion 20 years later. I still like it though for different reasons. It’s a snapshot of who I was and what I stood for when I got it. Tbh I don’t regret it at all and mostly forget I even have the thing. I think I’m lucky to have a mindset to appreciate that permanence, a lot of people end up regretting ‘meaningful’ tattoos once they lose their meaning.
I'm 50 now and never got a tattoo; pretty happy because I'm not sure where I would have put it that hasn't bagged, sagged or disappeared.
I'm not sure, in my experience, the older people I know with tats have exactly the personality that goes along with it.
I knew a man who had been in the Navy, in the Pacific, during WW2. Not many men of his generation had tattoos, but most of the ones who did were sailors, and he was no exception. Large tattoo on his forearm: a jester, with the hat and bells, like from a deck of cards.
I knew another man of that generation with a number tattooed on his wrist. He never talked about it.
None of the millennials I know who got tatted during the height of the fashion wave match the character* of being tattooed. And some of them really went all out. Truly amazing what the desire to conform to our tribe will make us do to ourselves.
(*statistically a drug addict, criminal or prostitute)
Maybe I shouldn't be telling on myself like this, but I think tattoos look really cool and the only reason I'm not getting one is because how many people look down on them.
I think for some people, at least myself, tattoos are a narrative, it's such a bizarre process, half art and half science, that each session, wether it was in a punk house with no electricity or an upscale art gallery on the other side of the world gets ingrained a little deeper. They're like little time machines, I can remember who I was, where I was, who I was with. And I'm guessing I'm in the minority here, but I can't stand the look of a fresh clean tattoo, the stick and poke in a dorm room, the 20 year old one done in a studio that wasn't too concerned with checking ids, the one that was done way too deep, in the dark, and healed into a puff sticker like scar consistency, that's what I love. I've considered a few times going in and getting some of my more visible ones removed, and the occasional must wear long sleeved shirt wins every time, no matter what I gain or lose, I like my garbage art time machines
I got inked twice before I made a commitment to my third tattoo on my wrist so it would be plainly visible. I committed to never working with or for someone who refused to hire a person because of something like a tattoo. Sometimes the commitment goes beyond the ink on the skin.
The idea that your character is able to be quantized to a moment in time instead of the history of your life is bizarre to me.
For the vast majority of people who haven’t suffered some kind of brain damage, life is append only and the current state is completely dependent on the history. You have markers of your past good and bad decisions all over you.
I don’t regret or fancy my decade old tattoos.
They symbolize a past life to me basically, and that brings meaning and unique introspection to me in a way.
It depends on one's outlook. I know people who's attitude is both "boy that was a dumb tattoo to get at 18" and "dumb 18 year old me is still me, and I don't want to remove that tattoo any more that I want to remove that part of myself".
Obviously circumstances may change if the tattoo is offensive.
Your second perspective captures my personal take. I feel indifferent about the actual ink at this point. It’s more about a personal/symbolic mark of who I am, who I was, maybe who I’ll be - all the same person. No regrets.
"Nothing lasts forever, only change" --Genghis Khan
change is the only constant
except from vending machines
Some people get them as things they have done or experienced. In that sense it doesn't matter if they change in life because their story hasn't.
I don't have tattoos because I could never commit to having any specific image permanent on my skin. I have considered getting a public key tattooed though.
a qr code for your home page may be another option
A guy in jail once described his tattoos as “a permanent reminder of a temporary idea” and I found it insightful.
For many of us keeping a reference to not change/forget some things is a strategy not a mistake.
Yup, that's what all my tattoos are. They're markers of things I've done, experiences had, and mistakes made.
If when I get older and those memories mean less to me, the tattoos will become markers of who I was and what was once important to me. I could see myself getting some of them removed, but I don't think it's likely.
Because of the way my brain is, it's difficult for me to stay attached to the past. Having permanent marks on my body makes the past unforgettable, inescapable. I like to think it's made an improvement on the person I've become, but of course it's impossible to know.
And I only recently got my first tattoo around 40. Not sure this article makes it clear what is driving this trend? Tattoos come and go out of style even in my own life (when i was young to young adult, it was bad, then it was good, now seemingly bad again). If I don’t like my tattoo in 20 years I really don’t care, you can always replace it with more work if it fades. Probably will get more. It isn’t very expensive. It’s a form of expression I can’t really get anywhere else - I like looking at my tattoo and dont particularly care what anyone thinks of it.
I’d assume that the driving force is just “more people have tattoos”
This, back in the days having a tatoo was a symbol of rebellion against a norm. Now that everyone and his mother is law has one, it has become a symbol of submission to the norm and establishment.
I laugh that my most obvious form of rebellion is not going with the trend of getting any ink or piercings.
Those large gauge ear plugs didn’t age well AT ALL.
I'm 40 now, and have always wanted a tattoo but could never decide what I should get. I was thinking something linux or maybe vmware related because I love both of those things. Very glad I didn't get anything vmware related now!
A tattoo of proprietary software or really any company seems kind of sad and dystopian to me. Nothing against vmware in particular. I recall an old meme collage of a bunch of people with Apple tattoos that was not putting them in a favorable light.
Maybe a Sun logo could be an exception, they're not around anymore, so it feels more like nostalgia or grieving instead of "this company owns me". I wasn't around/aware when Sun was, also, so they feel more like a mythical thing from a story to me than an old company.
Same here, I want a tattoo, but can't decide what is something I care about enough to get on my skin forever.
I've kinda sorta decided on a hex/honeycomb pattern so I can fill each hex with e different thing. That would keep it consistent (can't stand the style of tattoos where they're just slapped haphazardly everywhere) but still variable enough.
I had a similar issue, so I just got something small and essentially random. Now that the seal is broken, thinking of more tattoos is easy.
I had the same idea about a linux tattoo. Then I decided I could also design a new linux t-shirt or sweater for myself each year.
You're too smart to write on yourself
I used to want the visual c++ 6 icon lol
> Not sure this article makes it clear what is driving this trend
People who got inked in the 90s tattoo boom are now wearing blurry smudges unless they were careful to minimize the fine detail.
> Not sure this article makes it clear what is driving this trend?
Technology improvements leading to better removal quality, reduced removal times, less post-procedure pain, and better word-of-mouth response is a suggestion.
Up until the 2010's the range of Quality(Q)-switched lasers was the main tool available. They produce pulse widths in the nanosecond range and can remove multiple colors. Big improvements over the Argon and CO2 laser systems from pre-80's / 90's with less scarring. However, often still had long, painful recoveries between sessions (depending on the tattoo).
In the 2010's, the various picosecond pulse-width laser systems came out, and they usually require less sessions than the Q-switched procedures people are used to, and the reports tend be of less pain and discomfort after the removal procedure (described like getting a bad sunburn). Probably both have resulted in better word of mouth, and larger numbers recommending getting removal.
A friend of mine tattoos in my city and we were talking about this a few weekends ago. He mentioned three related things that contribute to removals he’s aware of.
Tattooing got immensely popular and a lot of people who shouldn’t not have taken on apprentices took on apprentices. The quality of apprenticeships dropped and artists were getting put on skin way before they were ready. Many artists never learned proper technique or placement.
Styles changed so people were getting their first tattoos in visible places. When he started tattooing, artists wouldn’t do a first tattoo somewhere visible unless the client had a very very good reason. It always took dialogue. Now you can walk into a shop, point to flash and get it out on your neck or hand.
And finally, realism hit tattoos.
So in his opinion. You take a lot of artists who shouldn’t have been putting ink into grapefruits not skin. Put them to them to work on highly visible realistic looking art on people who don’t know enough about tattoo to know whether they’re making a mistake. And you end up with a lot of people staring at visible art that didn’t heal properly, with blown out lines and poor placement.
I didn’t get tattooed until after another good friend had finished his apprenticeship- I’m very glad I waited because I love my art and will slowly keep getting more. But I feel bad for people who fell into that trap of getting an unqualified artist to put bad art on their bodies.
I think you meant "should" and not "shouldn't" both times used here, if I'm understanding what you're trying to say correctly.
My grandma used to have a copy of "The Sneetches" by Dr. Suess I read as a kid. A guy rolls into town and convinces all the sneetches critters that they ought to have a star put on their stomach to be special with a machine he built. Then when everyone gets one they don't feel special so he offers a machine to remove them. Chaos ensues.
This is one of my favorite stories, because you realize later how many things in life this applies to. Once the 'others' start doing something, the originals don't do it anymore! You see it in everything from food menus, to devices, to clothes, etc.
It used to be that tattoos were a marker of some combination of lower class, military, sports, etc. But you'd pretty much never see them in general on most middle/upper-class professionals. That changed with developers etc. over the past couple decades. Not shocking that might reverse. Not personal commentary but just an observation.
I think society's attitude towards people with tattoos ebbs and flows over time too. I think with the recent political happenings we might be in a bit of an ebb.
> lower class, military, sports, etc.
I think I'd put "counter culture" rather than lower class.
No it was definitely for the lower class only.
Now it’s “counter culture” to not have a tattoo. They are so common. They have become a sign of conformity.
Watch An Officer and a Gentleman sometime. (Pretty decent movie.) There's a scene where the Richard Gere character shows up to training (I guess) and he has a tattoo covered up. As I recall the drill sergeant rips the bandage off and basically mocks him for it with the implication being that officers don't have tattoos.
I would describe me and my environment as pretty normal middle class and I do not know a single person who has a visible tattoo.
I don't know where you live or what generation you are in. In my country, it seems that every young woman has a tattoo.
I think a majority, perhaps nearly all, of my daughter's friends have tattoos (early 20s). Not huge ones... a little flower on the ankle, etc. This is in the Pacific Northwest, though. They really got big here, to the point I agree it's a little rebellious of a young person to not get a tattoo.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/15/32-of-ame...
38% of women vs 27% of men. The number would be higher for young women.
“Lower class” matches. There was a time that tattoos were seen as something for sailors and convicts.
Not really for the last 30 years?
"There was a time"? Which I think pretty much matches.
There's probably a lot of intersection. Don't really disagree. Though counter-culture folks I went to school with in engineering/etc. still didn't tend to have tattoos.
Not until the very late 80s and 90s. Prior was dirt bags, bikers and sailors.
lower class worked quite nicely actually
My understanding is that it was an upper class thing in the late 1800s.
Fashion goes in cycles and all that.
I really like my tattoos but this is why I've chosen to have them in easily covered areas.
Tattoos say different things to different people in different times. Right now tattoos are fine in most white collar settings but this won't always be the case.
It would have seemed weird 20-30 years ago. Now, pretty normal, especially in developer and adjacent settings.
Middle and upper class professionals have plenty of tattoos. They just have them in places that are easily covered up when they're at work.
well if the capitalists get their way, we'll be lower class soon enough! :D
oh that evil capitalists ..., pfff
Yea, their objective is to optimize labor costs and increase profit margins. It is an objective that is diametrically opposed to our well being in the long run.
Don't confuse a state of affairs where the capitalists are having difficulty replacing us (thus reducing pressure on us) with a general beneficence, their relationship to us is purely transactional and we are disposable. Have solidarity with your class.
I got a tattoo to cover a birth mark a while ago. I used to be nervous about people seeing the mark before, now I enjoy people looking at my tattoo instead.
I think tattoos are cool because it's art where your body is the canvas. Pure human evolution really. I'll be getting more tattoos soon.
During the height of my adolescence, I had pretty bad acne and jokingly wanted to get a constellation tattoo connecting the pock marks to distract from it.
I didn't realise you can do that. Is the mark incorporated in the design or actually covered?
Flat birthmarks are fine. I was told you can’t tattoo over raised ones, although I suspect this might be more about detecting skin cancer than anything else.
Yea my tattoo artist told me that some skin surfaces can't be tattooed but mine was just a weird looking pattern. Could be about skin cancer or macrophages that feed on the ink.
I've seen a video of one person doing birth mark tattoos with pigment that matches their skin color to effectively disappear them. I'm sure if you got a tan or something they would look like a color negative of the originals but for casual appearance that might be something worth looking into.
Definitely an option. Depending on where you live, it might be possible to maintain the same skin color year round.
I got it covered but I thought about getting a more elaborate design at some point. I wanted something minimalist as my first tattoo to see how it does. Now that I like tattoos I'm gonna experiment more in the future.
It's definitely doable and could be a boost in confidence for some people, like it was for me.
It seems like the market has filled up with body art that fits someplace between permanent tattoos and the little toy temporary tattoos that are basically stickers. Stuff that lasts for weeks, months, or years before fading away. Encouraging people to try those out first before committing to something permanent would be wise.
It turns out that those ephemeral tattoos did not fade out in time and are extremely problematic when trying to laser remove them. The company that originally started that tech is gone, and the "ephemeral" tattoos they created are still around.
I think the parent is actually referring to the sticker tattoos that wash away within a few days (or all at once if you use shampoo).
They're pretty great for vacations and events.
They specifically said “stuff that lasts for weeks, months, and even years. There are temp tattoos that do that, but the tech wasn’t great.
The article touches on this only briefly at the end, but I wonder whether the popularity of tattoos is beginning to wane. After more than a decade of a cultural embrace of tattoos, we could be starting to see the fashionability of tattoos decline (and then I'm sure it'll be back in a couple decades).
But this is also why face tattoos are more popular. Face tattoos are still considered “hardcore” of whatever. Before just having a tattoo anywhere made you an outsider. But then emo happened and everything that was cool was commoditized and now the modern world is the way it is. Or something. I don’t know how you feel but I think we should blame the world on emo.
I haven't seen a good-looking face tattoo yet.
What about Mike Tyson's. Looks pretty good to me.
Head tattoos are quite cool too. This Youtuber's (https://www.youtube.com/@Gratitude.Driven) tattoos are pure art for example.
Mike Tyson's is very clean, but personally I just don't like "tribal" tattoos unless you're Maori or part of a cultural that does them. They seem more cohesive somehow.
Ok, I do like her head tattoos.
It's generally an indicator of poor impulse control. Lack of taste comes with the package.
Chakotay.
"you are unique, just like everyone else"
this guy probably thinks Green Day is emo lol
Having a well-made tattoo is one thing. But most of the kids with tattoos these days seem to just have a bunch of random small tattoos sprinkled all over with no discernible rhyme or reason, and that I just don't get.
That said, I'm old enough that most of those could be my kids, so I realize I'm an old fart at this point.
One good one I heard is that before you get a tattoo, go to the local water park. You'll have ample time waiting in line to look at what your hypothetical tattoo, or a close enough one, will look like on all sorts of bodies and skins.
If you like 'em get one. If you don't like it later, remove it. Sounds good to me. I always take ideas to the extreme to see if they still make sense. It seems like over time tattoos are becoming less permanent and it isn't inconceivable that they could become exceptionally transient meaning add/remove at will (or even become 'live' interactive displays). Does that change their meaning or value? Some people wear a belt buckle or jewelry for decades because of sentimental value even though they can easily change things. I suspect in a future where this is easy/normal we will see even more variety, expression and meaning.
If there were microdot e-ink tattoos (whatever their equivalent would be in human machine interface systems, anyway) I would strongly consider getting one. You can do a lot with a 64x64 matrix especially if you can change it with a usb powered overlay device or like a laser at a specific light frequency or something.
Output is cool, but I think the input possibilities are pretty high too.
Multiple members of my family have tattoos or brands. I've just never felt the need to permanently mark my body like that, so I feel like I'm considered somewhat boring or vanilla for not getting one myself. Of course, they don't know that I'll be first in line should novel in-vitro genetic manipulation technology become available. We'll start with growing a tail and work from there. Turns out, when it comes to body mods, I'm less, "Ew," more, "Go big or go home."
The Dr. Seuss story about the Sneetches comes to mind.
When I was leaving for the navy, the last thing my mom said was, "don't get a tattoo." I never did but that was in 1981, maybe half a decade before tattoos and body piercings started becoming a mainstream thing.
I'm in LA and it's a very big trend here atm. My thought is some cultural influencers are leading the way but I'm not really in tune.
It seems mostly like induced demand from the equipment being cheap and readily available these days. People have always regretted their tattoos after getting older, but it was never a thing in the 90s or 2000s to just go down to a local clinic and have it done for a few hundred bucks. It was something you just heard about rich/famous people doing every now and then.
I live above a tattoo shop with a big window that people get tattoo'd in so everyone on the street walking by can see. I've been calling it the window of future regrets.
The owner has a removal studio not far away.
I've looked into getting my tattoos removed after reading about Pete Davidson, of all people.
Then I looked into it, and it seems to be pretty hit or miss. Some people have great outcomes, some people end up with something that looks even worse than what they started with. It can take years for the removal process, and you won't know if you're going to end up with a good or bad result until the end.
That doesn't even touch on the price.
So, for me, I'm just going to cover mine up, and accept that I've only got a few more decades with them anyway.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35155032/
Tattoos, a common form of body adornment, have been associated with numerous cutaneous complications. These include not only benign neoplasms and malignant tumors but also lymphoid conditions occurring within the tattoo.
> "Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002.
> Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html (April 02005)
Great article, thanks for sharing. Though what I liked about it has nothing to do with tattoos.
Towards the end he talks about how people trusted blogs and online content more because mainstream media was fake and biased.
The final paragraph:
> PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.
This is where we are now. It's even worse, I guess. Publishing online is essentially free, so they don't really have to try hard. And we are left with the work of separating the wheat out of this tsunami of chaff. The future of the Internet looks bleak TBH.
Tattoos as fashion: The height of youthful confidence; when one's 20-year-old self presumes to know what one's 40-year-old self will desire.
If those tattoo's had meaningful sentiment for the owner, and you knew that sentiment, would you view that person different than a "fashionista tattoo seeker" ?
edit : I have a few tattoo's my first at 18, my best friend killed himself, so I took his scratch he made on his guitar and make a tattoo. it's not astetic by any means but now I build a collection of memories of the people important to me who are around and meld them all together.
I like this, means the most to me. Can look horrible to others. But tattoos are not all born equal.
You are right and my answer is yes. (I elaborated my thought in another reply under my parent comment; the essence being that tattoos with the function of fashion likely lead to regret, while other tattoos don't.)
It's really easy actually
You just pick something really cool when you're 20, and then you resist turning into a boring person who hates what you used to like when you're 40
It's called "Peter Pan Syndrome".
Naw
It's just having the maturity to realize that you don't have to stop having fun just because you're getting older
It's also important to have the maturity to realize that there is a time and place for embracing your inner child
I have a tattoo of a sword buried in molten rock on my bicep. It was kind of inspired by the bonfire from Dark Souls. I don't tend to go around showing it off at work events or whatever.
I absolutely do not regret it even though it is admittedly kind of a childish tattoo. I think it's cool. I show it off to people that I think will also think it's cool
I tried to not make an all inclusive statement, thus formulating it as "Tattoos as fashion", as I do recognize there are people happy with their tattoos, thus not subject to regret.
What I tried to get at, but wasn't clear about, is that tattoos serve a functional purpose (in your case it seems to partly be an identifier).
Then, specifically, tattoos with the function of fashion, is what likely leads to regret by the general laws of fashion. To quote "Project Runaway": "one day you're in, the next day you're out."
I think social media has done what it does best, skewing people perspective. Look up almost any tattoo artist on social media and you'll see a portfolio of beautiful work. Artists never post their bad tattoos (Ariel DeJesus excluded). It makes it seem like everyone is giving and getting amazing tattoos. Then when someone gets a tattoo and it's just average, they are disappointed.
More people have tattoos, so it's only natural that more people would get tattoos removed. Doesn't strike me as particularly surprising.
It's a lengthy, expensive, and often painful process. Getting shoddy work covered might be a better deal in some cases.
Right - The tech/procedure to remove bad tats is also getting less expensive and more available. Very misleading headline imo
I've never gotten tattoos, and it's in part due to the fact nobody I respected growing up had them. People act like they're ubiquitous but tattoos are still a class signifier, and you can still miss out on jobs or other opportunities if an employer sees your tattoo(s).
I am thinking what all that stuff written and drawn on people should tell me? I cant even talk to them while commuting, they only stare in their phones. What is it my business when the litte daughter was born or a half readable scribbling above the boobs is there? I dont get many tatoos, some of them you see around the world in the same manner. Some are complete bullshit. But well, as long as people have money for getting and then removing them, all is fine.
all the tramp stamps and terrible back tattoos from early 2000s?
i see more aging hipsters than ever with sleeves and they seem to keep adding, so i wonder if this is "genre" specific.
You get a tramp stamp because your drunk friends decided it was a good idea. You get a sleeve when you've thought about it for a while, and budgeted for a $1500+ expenditure. I think it's a different mindset.
The only people I know who got a sleeve lazered off did it because they wanted to replace it, not because they wanted to be ink free.
Tattoos come and go in fads, and it's weird how some people will insist their quirky line tattoo is an ephemeral trend
I waited until my late 20's to get tattooed. One of the few good decisions I made as a young person.
Since tattoos themselves have greatly increased what's really going on here?
I grew up in the tattoo era (teenager in the 90s) and never got one. I just told myself to represent something, buy a tshirt. I've noticed people with tattoos love to show them off, either in person or on Youtube. Tattoos are like motorcycles, the people with them seem to think everyone cares. I do have a motorcycle so I can sense that mentality from the community.
The only thing I would possibly tattoo is something about me that will never change, for me that's my religious views. That said, my religion has mixed reviews on if tattoos are even acceptable at all, our body being a temple.
Overall, I still feel tattoos should be relegated to prisons and skid row as I'm old fashioned. I wouldn't recommend or encourage anyone to get one. People are leaning more conservative as a sign of the times. That's the root of the trend against tattoos. Even famous tattoo artists like Kat Von D has wanted to remove hers and felt she was better off blacking them out instead.
I am not sure I want to have the same painting or a poster on the wall not even for the rest of my life but for 5-10 years. Apart from maybe a tattoo with one's blood group frankly I am puzzled by the idea of getting even the most artsy-fartsy tattoo anywhere on my body.
Ed Sheeran is the poster child for bad tattoos. As rich as he is he got tattoos from some very bad artists.
I got my entire arm blacked out like 20 years ago, back before it became a subtrend. Back when I did it I think I had only ever seen it one other place and that was some guy featured in BME. Whenever people ask me about it I tell them the truth, which is when I did it I was obsessed with taking things to their logical extreme, and blackout to me at the time was the logical extreme of tattoo, which is covering your skin in ink. I've since had my other arm done with an extremely colourful trippy design. The contrast is immediate but the story for me is one of life stages, and not just any life stages but my life stages. I don't care what the current fashion is, they're staying.
There's a lot of bad tattoos out there. It's something people should give more thought to, but tattoos can look really good if they're done well.
I find it pretty damning that AI Art will not put tattoos on beautiful people(unless specifically instructed).
I think everyone knew this to be true, but we are polite to people who have tattoos.
On the flip side, there are people who claim 'I don't care what they think'. And this is just an anti-social attitude in disguise of rebellion. It genuinely doesnt matter, people make split second judgements that DO affect you, even if you claim you don't care.
I've been at busy events and decided to talk to a decently dressed person over the person wearing raggy clothing. We notice patterns, often subconsciously.
how is it anti-social to not to engage with someone whose overly judging you? seems like a pretty universal response. sure everyone has first level impressions, but I’m not going to put my energy into someone who never outgrew the child level thinking of leading head first into surface level impressions
I assume OP means antisocial in the clinic sense, not social vs introverted
>I’m not going to put my energy into someone who never outgrew the child level thinking of leading head first into surface level impressions
Less opportunities for you because you are (intentionally) ignorant of human nature.
As mentioned, people make split second judgements. It doesnt matter if you are the top 5 smartest people in the world, people do not have the resources to 'vet' everyone. We look at patterns and realize that people with Face tattoos are less likely to be excellent.
This is textbook idealism. That is the way the world Ought to be. That isnt how the world Is. We are shaped by experiences.
There is something a bit reinforcing on this topic. The people deliberately violating social norms claim they 'don't care'. I imagine the smartest people are aware this stuff does matter, so they don't violate social norms.
Some people get tattoos or dress in a nonconforming way specifically to filter out people with this line of thinking.
Suppose they 'filter out', and as a result, they don't get a job that they interviewed for. They wanted the job, or they wouldn't have applied.
They don't get approached at a social event, yet they attended to meet people.
They can say as many times "Its a filter", but the filter only hurt them. Not the other way around. Its a 'Grapes are sour anyway" situation.
I don't have any tattoos but I'd rather be judged for something surface level than for having a belief like "let's all aspire to be the default Stable Diffusion idea of a person."
Silly.
You prefer to be less beautiful and judged negatively on surface level appearances?
Yeah sureeee. I prefer to make less money, have less friends, and have less influence too /s
I think tattoos can quite often look nice, so no, not everyone "knew this to be true."
Just say what you believe instead of trying to launder your opinion as generally accepted truth.
Do you have any photos of someone before and after tattoos that make them look more beautiful?
It's hard to find before, but most irezumi style tattoos!
When I woke up from study-job-relationship marathon lasting 2005-2019 and looked around I realised everyone have tattoos including underage and doctors, including face tattoos. Luckily this is passing.
Whatever happened to Inkbox (temporary tattoos)?
Acquired by BIC in 2022 https://corporate.bic.com/en-us/news/bic-acquires-inkbox
If the pool of people having tattoos grows (and it does), so does the total amount of people removing them.
The more interesting question is how the percentages changed — although that very likely just tells you something about the quality and availability of tattoo removal services.
When the president of El Salvador started throwing people in concentration camps based on tattoos, I said gangs will adapt and just stop getting such prominent tattoos. I wonder if that has something to do with this.
That's what happened with Rampart: young gang members didn't get tattoos so they could join their neighborhood police and take out other gangs.
I will wait to get tattoos until the state of the art advances to a point where you can regular change them out without much hassle, and they look just like the real thing.
I think temporary tattoos will eventually just get good enough to allow you to accomplish the same end.
That’d be cool, I’d love sporting custom tattoo sleeves for a month or so, and then changing them up.
more people have tattoos that, given other social indicators, would probably not have gotten (as many) tattoos as they might have in the past. it's definitely been something of a fad over the last decade or so that seems to be ebbing a bit (at least according to friends of mine who tattoo - bad for them, but that's life).
we saw the same thing over a shorter period with stretched ears - a lot of people did it at the height of its popularity but have since let their piercings close (or resorted to surgery if they were past that point).
tbh, i don't really care if "squares/normies" get tattoos or weird piercings (or get them removed), but i do kinda welcome the return to "otherness" that it used to confer. i like having tattoos and piercings for their own sake. even though 99% of my tattoos are extremely stupid and i wouldn't get them today, i'm happy to keep them as a reminder of where i was in life when i got them.
> tbh, i don't really care if "squares/normies" get tattoos or weird piercings (or get them removed)
EDIT: I think I misinterpreted your statement, but I'll leave my response anyway just because. I thought you meant "get" in the sense of understanding them.
I appreciate you saying this offhand for some reason, even though I don't think you were trying to give credit to others.
Naturally, I am both liberal and perhaps libertarian in the sense that I think people have a right to get tattoos and I don't have a problem with people having them.
What has long bugged me though are the numerous people who clearly get body modifications in order to attract validation from others. If one isn't in their unspoken club, they become super defensive and accusatory.
For example, as much as I have no interest in getting tattoos, I will compliment people on their tattoos that I appreciate. When inevitably asked in response why I don't have any tattoos, I tell the other person that I simply have no desire for one. When that answer isn't accepted, I sometimes (mistkenly) admit that I don't like them in general. This triggers a lot of tattoo people, even though my choice of words doesn't actually suggest that I hate all tattoos or their tattoos.
On an even more intense level, it's verboten in my society, as a man, to openly state a preference for women without tattoos. I never bring it up unless prompted, yet I often get so much blowback for this. The word "judgmental" always gets slung my way. It's pretty clear that something else is going on here when people get this defensive over something that is fairly trivial.
How do you get people to ask you about your preference for tattooed vs "natural" women?
Some people like to show off their new tattoos and ask my opinion, or I will just compliment someone on a tattoo they have that caught my notice. And sometimes that leads to "You got any tattoos?" or "You ever gonna get a tattoo?"
As far as the woman thing goes, guys have a tendency to talk about women, and sometimes the topic of tattoo'd women comes up. I've been on this planet for nearly 40 years, so while this isn't really a common conversation, I've encountered it enough times to notice recurring themes.
Could be that they're understanding your preference as a normative statement. You're probably not the first person to mention how they would look better without tattoos, even if that's not exactly what you meant.
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Imagine deciding in your early 20's back in the 1990's to put on that awful floral shirt and those jeans torns and ripped with paisley patches. Your mullet hairstyle, your 10 earrings.
Now that's your fashion decision for the rest of your life because you thought this is such a cool look, you'll wear it until you die.
That's tattoos.
The amount of people who get tattoos expecting the style to continue forever is astounding
That is absolutely how I feel about it. And even if you don't, the world changes. Someone I know got his band logo tattooed, a big HP. Then a decade later 'Harry Potter' becomes the iconic HP with a similar style font ....
Hilarious. I'm imagining he gets the "Michael Bolton from Office Space" experience a lot if it's somewhere on his body that's easily visible. "So who's you're favorite character?"
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned how these days having a tattoo, no matter which, is a potential one-way ticket to a prison in El Salvador. That's a very good reason to having them removed.
That only applies to non-citizens, like Garcia, and I don't think his MS-13 tattoos were the reason for his removal, he was sent home because he was here illegally and had prior charges (such as beating his wife)
No, it doesn't. When you are denying people due process, that means they can accuse you of being a non-citizen, even when you are.
If everyone doesn't have the right to due process, no one does.
Of course it has nothing to do with his tattoos.