My Life as a Marked Man
When the tattooed man sat down for dinner, two elderly ladies commenced whispering at the next table.
“What’s that on his neck?”
“Ask him.”
“No, no. Don’t ask.”
“Look at his arm.”
Horrified, they were, by the image of an iguana on his neck. And why in heaven’s name would he deface his biceps with a snarling panther? They didn’t expect this sort of person to be dining beside them at a staid Westside restaurant.
The tattooed man was me.
I count myself among the “hip fringe,” which is to say I wear an earring and occasionally hang out at the King King club, but I don’t ride a Harley.
However, I wasn’t offended by the whispers. In fact, I sort of agreed.
Tattoos have never particularly appealed to me. They seemed to fall into two categories: A fierce badge for bikers, convicts and others who rail against society. Or a silly decal for MTV poseurs and those palefaces who haunt Melrose Avenue in black leather.
Lately, though, dragons and panthers and fiery skulls are peeking from under the shirt sleeves of all sorts of people. Lorenzo Lamas and Melanie Griffith have tattoos. Roseanne Arnold has a bunch. George Shultz reportedly served as Secretary of State with a tattoo on his posterior. Cher has one on her, too.
“Skin ink” has become a pop status symbol. The marked crowd has swollen to an estimated 20 million Americans--no small fad.
What did these people know that I didn’t? Would a tattoo make me sexier? Tougher? Would it declare my individuality--a sort of self-actualization through self-maiming?
I wasn’t willing to alter my body to find out. But I was willing to spend a week wearing fake tattoos--you know, those stickers we rubbed on our arms as kids. Now they are more elaborate and durable.
After an hour in the bathroom, I emerged with the iguana, the panther and a dragon on my other arm. My forearms bore a heart and screaming eagle.
Would strangers recoil in disgust? Would they embrace me as a forward thinker? What would the clerk at my corner 7-Eleven say?
The first reaction I confronted was my own. Crowded elevators suddenly made me self-conscious. Around strangers, I was careful to be articulate and polite, to act the way I thought tattooed people didn’t. At restaurants, I worried: “Am I using the correct fork?”
But the inky little devils were a bit intoxicating. I soon fancied myself rough, not shaving and wearing dirty jeans. My girlfriend offered to buy me some sleeveless undershirts from K mart.
As for others, a pattern quickly formed.
Friends weren’t fooled. Casual acquaintances were but were often too polite to say anything. Strangers commented freely.
“You must have been very drunk,” one man said. Others wanted to know if it hurt. And, they asked with occasional salacity, did I have tattoos on other parts of my body? One of the whispering ladies eventually leaned across from her table. Her name was Ann and she pointed at the tattoo on my neck.
“What is that?”
“An iguana,” I explained.
“Why would you do that to yourself?”
“Because I think it looks good.”
Her hand waved in dismissal. “You don’t have to look at it.”
Pharaohs wore tattoos, I might have argued. Queen Victoria was rumored to have one. In many non-European cultures, tattooing is considered beautification of the body.
But my artwork drew glares from clean-cut types in banks and department stores and at a USC football game. “I thought maybe you’d been in the Navy,” remarked one woman.
“It’s that stereotype and prejudice of the drunken sailor,” said Myrna Armstrong, an associate professor at the University of Texas who has studied tattoos. After all, skin ink has always been the mark of misfits in this country. Tattooed ladies don’t meet for formal tea; they disrobe in freak shows.
Nonetheless, Armstrong said, “I have come to realize that tattooing is not going to go away.”
Try explaining that to my neighbor, Richard, who cringed: “Dude, do you enjoy pain?” Or to the woman who cuts my hair, Suzanne, who adopted a motherly tone: “And what is that on your neck?”
But another friend, Dean, got so curious that he got a fake tattoo of his own. An Asian dragon. He wore short sleeves to his law office the next morning.
“You catch people glancing down at it, but most people don’t say anything,” he reported. Then, in a spin on my own ambivalence, he added: “The thing is, I kind of dig having a tattoo. That scares me.”
He shouldn’t have been so surprised, according to the guy at the World Famous Emporium of Tattoos in Van Nuys. “Everybody gets tattoos,” he said. “Lawyers, doctors, you name it.”
*
Think of a tattoo as sentimental, suggested a gruff-sounding woman who answered the telephone at the National Tattoo Assn. in Allentown, Pa. She said family portraits are a current favorite. The wife and kids emblazoned across your back. That sort of thing.
“Maybe a grandparent that has passed on,” she suggested.
Dead grandma on my shoulder? I doubt that would sway the ladies in the restaurant.
Our society has a love-hate relationship with tattoos. They are as sleazy as a supermarket tabloid. And every bit as intriguing.
“Can I touch it?” Ann asked as she was getting up from her table.
She ran a finger across my neck, then winced.
I sort of agreed with her. The things were getting on my nerves. Seeing them in the mirror every morning, well, it was like wearing the same shirt every day. It was boring.
For this reason alone, I’m betting that the next fad among the hip fringe will be tattoo removal. After all, anything that appears on Cher’s butt can’t stay popular forever.
