First, a little bragging.
Last week, my nephew, Clayton Krollman, of Burke, Virginia, was accepted into the honors architecture program at the University of Maryland.
Go, Clay!
This was huge news for him, the culmination of years of study and extracurricular work. We’re thrilled and wish him the very best.
But today’s column isn’t about the stress of the college application process or the stratospheric cost of higher education. It’s about celebration.
Specifically: how does the high school senior of 2012 mark an important milestone?
By getting a tattoo, of course. And not just any tattoo – in Clay’s case, a sentence lifted from a short story by Amy Hempel, his favorite author (present company excepted), inked in two neat lines on the inside of his bicep.
While tattoos aren’t exactly the norm in the United States — at least not yet — Clay’s in good company. According to recent polls, more than a third of Americans aged 18- 25 have tattoos.
And that number is only going up.
In the last few years, tattoos have burst into the cultural mainstream, high and low, in the form of everything from reality television shows about the artists who create them to museum exhibitions showcasing these artists’ ever more elaborate and sophisticated designs.
In the surest sign yet of mass acceptance, last year Mattel introduced a tattooed Barbie, adding a spicy dimension to that aspirational icon of American womanhood.
Full disclosure: I don’t have one. And not because I’m a prude.
Well, not entirely.
I find tattoos fascinating. Some of them are beautiful; some are sexy; some are poignant.
I suppose I haven’t gotten one because I’m acutely aware of how much my tastes change over the decades. As a writer, I look at a story I wrote twenty years ago and cringe. I may still like some of the sentences, perhaps a turn of phrase or two. But overall…not so much.
What if, in the flush of excitement that every writer experiences when he finishes a story, I’d gone out and had my favorite line inked in my skin?
Yikes!
This is not to say that Clay won’t age well with the line he’s chosen from Ms. Hempel. It’s personal, so I won’t quote it, but suffice it to say that the sentence is nicely skeptical and cryptic, and should be deep enough to move with him from decade to decade.
Personally, if push came to shove, I’d probably go with a classic. My favorite line from Jewish folklore, perhaps, attributed to King Solomon — “This too shall pass.” But that’s just like me in a reflective moment: now optimistic, now pessimistic, often patronizing, with notes of wistfulness and gloom.
You might as well go for a mood-killing momento mori and end the celebration as quickly as possible.
Speaking of which, one of the strongest associations I have with tattoos, and one of the hardest for me to overcome, is the infliction of a tattoo for the purpose of identification, invented in the ancient world to mark slaves, but perfected by the Nazis. This is the dark side of tattooing, the punitive side, the use of ink to dehumanize. The Romans used to tattoo phrases like “tax paid” on slaves for the export market. Worse, the words, “Stop me: I’m a runaway” were sometimes tattooed on their foreheads.
And it’s hard to imagine a worse sight than a string of black Gothic numbers on an elderly wrist or forearm.
Tattoos were stigmatized for centuries, partly as a monotheistic backlash against pagan practices, which in many cultures involved body-inking. To this day, orthodox Judaism and Islam expressly forbid tattoos, on the grounds of despoiling the temple of the body and making graven images. Christianity is much more lenient, especially in the case of religious-themed tattoos, a popular practice in Europe in the Middle Ages, when Christians in the Balkans fretted about forced conversion at the hands of Muslim Turks.
In fact, the word “stigma” itself denotes being tattooed or branded, the Latin-speaker’s nightmare of being marked as a slave.
The fact that tattoos were the province of “savages,” like the Samoans encountered by Captain Cook’s HMS Endeavor in 1769, didn’t help to advance their reputation. The Endeavor’s naturalist, Joseph Banks, wrote, “I shall now mention the way they mark themselves indelibly; each of them is so marked by their humour or disposition.”
Banks transcribed the Samoan word “tatau” as “tattoo” in his journal, and thus it entered the English language.
Once the mark of sailors, criminals, and circus folk, tattoos have broken free of their recent past and reconnected with their deep past. Tattoos have been found on Neolithic icemen; Egyptian mummies; and Scythian chieftains.
The meaning of some of these intricate designs have been lost to time. Surely celebration was in the mix.
But I doubt King Tut ever worried about his SATs.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 16 February 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
