Body Is a Temple -- or Anyway Not a Tattoo Canvas

Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia? Lydia The Tattooed Lady.

She has eyes that folks adore so, and a torso even more so.

Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclo-pidia. Oh Lydia, The Queen of Tattoo.

On her back is The Battle of Waterloo.

Beside it, The Wreck of the Hesperus too.

And proudly above waves the red, white, and blue.

You can learn a lot from Lydia!

*

I first heard that ditty in a Marx Brothers movie, which is where I felt like I was last week.

When reporters saunter off to write about a convention or a trade show, they generally return with some little souvenir. Not me; not this time. From the Body Art Expo at the Pomona Fairplex, I came away empty-handed -- un-tattooed and unpierced.

I went there to find out more about the supposed middle-class phenomenon, the notion that tattooing and piercing have gone mainstream, that “everybody” gets them these days. They’re no longer just for Yakuza hit men and green Marines and sideshow freaks and people accustomed to hearing themselves addressed as “defendant.”

Reagan’s secretary of State, George P. Schultz, had a Princeton tiger tattooed on his rear. My cousin Suzy has a butterfly on her shoulder. Everybody in the world has pierced ears but me, and I have nightmares about a girl in high school who got her lobes shredded by some guy who thought it would be funny to yank on her earrings.

So I felt as out of place at the Body Art Expo as an electric car in Dick Cheney’s driveway.

I don’t know where all the middle-class people were on Friday, the first day of the expo. Maybe they were still at their middle-class jobs, earning the 20 bucks per head to get admitted. I saw a few arguably middle-class people -- rose-tattooed mothers pushing baby-strollers and guys in Abercrombie & Fitch shorts that displayed their barbed-wire ankle tattoos.

But most were folks who seemed intimately acquainted with the angry-wasp sound of an electric tattoo needle. At one booth, whose operators were, like many at the expo, raising money for breast cancer research, tattooees were paging through an album of available designs -- the Statue of Liberty, 9/11 flats, pit bulls, Easter lilies -- as if it were a Sharper Image catalog. Now I for one certainly admire Lincoln and Einstein, but at the extreme, my regard would manifest itself in a T-shirt. In the bathroom, I saw a young woman with both men’s faces tattooed on her calf: You like those guys, then, I asked lamely. “Lincoln,” she agreed, “was a cool guy.”

Yes, it’s an ancient thing -- tattooing, scarification, old as humankind. That 5,000-year-old corpse found flash-frozen in the Alps a dozen years ago had tattoos. Yes, it’s all the rage, and tattoo parlors, like bowling alleys, have labored to become “clean, well-lighted places”; a quilt hanging at one booth bore the business’ name: Mom’s Tattooing and Piercing. And yes, it’s some people’s idea of art, elaborately and expensively wrought, Old Masters on new skin.

But walking around Building 5 at the fairgrounds, amid shoulders, bellies, thighs, necks, arms, backs covered in flames and scorpions and Virgins of Guadalupe and hearts and skulls and crucifixes and fish and flowers and Chinese characters ... amid all that punctured skin, lips and cheeks and eyebrows and noses and please don’t tell me where else -- I watched one such piercee smoking a cigarette, just to see how many holes the smoke might emerge from -- I thought of the pain and the blood and the paint and the expense, and I couldn’t bring myself to be very reportorial, because my only question would have been: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

So I eavesdropped. Monica Rodriguez of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin was being as polite and professional as if she were interviewing city council candidates. One young man, getting his already ornately tattooed collarbone further enhanced by his multiply pierced “stylist,” told her that his tattoos “communicate the things that are most dear to me.” And I looked at him and thought, pal, you have “Redi Kilowatt” tattooed on your chest: What does THAT communicate about you?

*

What I really wanted to find out in Pomona, and didn’t, was the tipping point. There’s a book by that title by Malcolm Gladwell, about how changing minor things can make for major consequences. One example: putting a campus map in a Yale brochure encouraging students to get tetanus shots lifted the vaccination rate substantially.

The tipping points I want to know about are less quantifiable: When and how did it become acceptable to have children out of wedlock? When did we start feeling comfortable telling people not to smoke? When did it start to seem all right to tell pregnant women they shouldn’t be drinking that glass of wine? The middle-classing of tattoos and piercings raised the same question: When will Bill Gates reveal a little “Microsoft Windows” logo on his wrist? How soon will a First Lady dish to Women’s Wear Daily about finding a belly ring to go with her inaugural gown?

*

I spent an hour at the booth of Dr. Bruce Heischober, of Redlands, who removes tattoos. He’s worked with Father Greg Boyle’s gang projects on L.A.’s east side, and in adolescent medicine. His Web site is plastered all over his booth: Inkon INKOFF.com. Ah, I figured. This is the man who sees the tattoo-in-haste, repent-at-leisure crowd: the people who realize that the Chihuahua tattoos they got at 18 will look like giraffes by the time they’re 80, the women who decide they don’t want to scar their babies’ psyches by breast-feeding them from a nipple with a dragon curled around it.

Not in the least. Most of Heischober’s clients “have an old tattoo they want removed to have another one put on,” a more elaborately artistic one. “They’re people who are serious about tattoos, who want their bodies to be a canvas.”

His only client whom I met Friday was Greg Locke, a Redlands man of 38 who still plays guitar but rather regrets the guitar he had tattooed on his hand when he was 16. He had most of it cut out -- don’t ask, he says, making a face -- but Heischober is using a laser to remove the remainder. Locke’s two kids, his 18-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son, have a couple of tattoos, but on a businessman, a former reserve sheriff’s deputy -- well, that’s another matter.

*

I departed as the band outside was cranking up head-banging music. I shoved a Mozart CD in the player. There’s one difference. Here’s another. Some of the people inside need a tattoo to remember their kids’ birthdays -- I use a Filofax. Maybe one of these days I’ll reach my tipping point, and get around to using that extreme new device, the Palm Pilot.

*

Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.