Tattoos and Stereotyping

Tattoos used to be something sailors did,’ a pensioner told a lad who defensively pointed out that the design on his arm wasn’t a tattoo, ‘It’s body art.’  Raising the profile somewhat there, though it does beg the question ‘What’s in a name?’doesn’t it? 

Tattoos have come a long way from when they were the ritual markings of a tribe or the sign of a shaman or a warrior.  Indian women have inspired the trend of the temporary tattoo with their old tradition of henna hand and feet painting.  Maoris still tattoo their faces using patterns which can be exclusive to one tribe.  Robbie Williams had complaints from New Zealand claiming that he had copied someone’s tribal image for his tattoo. 

There is definitely something about a tattoo that says ‘them and us,’ isn’t there?  Sailors often used to have ‘Mum’ tattooed on their arms but nowadays a lad might fear being thought of as a wimp or Mummy’s boy if he had that on his arm.  The old lady’s sailor friends may have announced what ship they belonged to by their tattoos, and the lad she was talking to may have been making a statement about his creative nature or love of things artistic, but tattoos do say different things to different people.

At the University of Western Australia, Kevin Durkin and Stephen Houghton studied how children stereotype people with tattoos.  They discovered that children between 6 and 10 years of age were prone to negatively stereotyping tattooed men.  The forensic implications of this are pretty obvious.  Little kids will always think of the tattooed guy as the ‘baddie,’ even if he didn’t commit the crime. 

The study used sentences which the children were told to pick to match photos of men with and without tattoos.  They attributed things like ‘carries a knife’ to the tattooed men.  That reminded me of the much tattooed Robert De Niro in Cape Fear, and of how the bad guys once were portrayed in many books and films.  The children who took part in this research had to have gotten their attitudes to men with tattoos from somewhere, didn’t they?  Though children primarily learn their attitudes from their parents, they also glean knowledge from wider society, which must still be telling them that many tattooed men are bad.  Sad, isn’t it?  But, the good thing that came out of the research was that this tendency to negatively stereotype tattooed men did diminish when the children reached 16.  Okay young Dads…..Just keep your tattoos covered up until your kids hit 16 then you’ll not frighten them!  Ha! Ha!