Artful Skin

How many of you have a tattoo – even one that only your lover sees because it’s normally covered by your clothes?  Chances are most of the young guys who read this because skin decoration is back in vogue.  A tattoo is a fashion must these days.

It was found in 1996 that tattooing was the sixth fastest growing retail market in the USA. 10% of teenagers had them despite it being illegal in 18 different states and within a year one new tattoo business parlor was opening every day somewhere in the country. Kids feel like the trailblazers of olden times but they are way off beam.

People have been doing it in one form or another for over 5,000 years.  An Ice Age man – 5,300 years old – was found in Austria and he had tattoos on his knee and back.  The Egyptians are known to have practiced it between 4000 and 2000 BC, by which time it had spread across southern Asia into China and Japan.

It was Captain Cook who introduced it into Europe in 1771, having seen the Tahitians doing it, but he was also a bit behind the times in some respects.  The ancient Egyptian art was well known to early Celts, Picts and Gauls in Scotland, while Saxons, danes and Norsemen covered their bodies in tribal symbols.

What you need to remember though is that these were real he-men because they underwent some terrible pain to get their tattoos.  South sea islanders used sharpened combs of bone or shell – tapped into the skin repeatedly with a wooden mallet using pigments of soot mixed with fat.

This intensely painful method held sway until the 1890’s when American Samuel O’Reilly invented the electric tattoo machine. What had previously taken many agonizing days could now be done in minutes and he was soon earning himself $100 a day.  There was still pain but nothing like what had gone before it.

Modern machines are much more user friendly – pumping needles into the skin 3000 times a minute and applying ink to the ‘Dermis’, the permanent skin layer that lies  below your outer one – which tends to flake off at the rate of 1million cells every 40 minutes.  Dermis cells stay with you for life.

Arms and hands are the most popular places to get a tattoo though shoulder blades are a big hit with the girls.  Some organizations like the Japanese Mafia – the Yakuza – and the Hell’s Angels have members who all wear symbolic tattoos on their bodies.

30 or so customers are enjoying free meals for life at the Casa Sanchez Mexican restaurant in San Francisco because they let themselves be decorated with the company logo.  The outcry when Mattell announced the imminent release of a tattooed Barbie was hilarious.  Kids want tattoos anyway because their favorite pop and sport stars have them.

Modern methods mean that nothing is impossible for a good tattoo artist so you can be as adventurous as you like.  It may be good to know that laser surgery is pretty effective at removing them painlessly these days but tattoos are high fashion now.  The boss might, on seeing yours be inclined to ask enviously where you got it done, instead of berating you for it.  He may really envy your artful skin.  How things have changed.