(personal highlights) - brilliant! Simply brilliant! Or... about human stupidity
Britain is suffering from a tattoo epidemic
They are only making an ugly country uglier
But these are the beautiful people. Much of modern Britain is not beautiful. Nor is it, shall we say, underfed. Yet instead of making the best of a bad situation – going on a diet, dressing well, generally making an effort – huge numbers of people actually double down on their unattractiveness by plastering their bodies with tattoos. Do they think it’ll stop us noticing? Do they think we’ll be so impressed by the image of the wolf howling plaintively at the mountains that we’ll fail to register the other several square feet of exposed skin around it? Even if that was going to work (it wasn’t), they’d still need to be careful. Keep at it with the doughnuts and that wolf is soon going to look like it’s had a facelift. Or things could go the other way, and the animal will disappear completely, lost down ever-deepening folds of tissue.
Then again, perhaps these people actually want to draw attention to their lack of aesthetic quality. In the old days if you didn’t give a monkey’s about your appearance you just went shopping in your string vest and left it at that. These days you wear something equally revealing and have a collection of tattoos for people to stare at. ‘Yes,’ goes the reasoning, ‘my body takes several seconds to stop moving after I have, and I could occupy three postcodes simultaneously – but there’s still a small chance I’ve stayed off your radar. So just in case, here are a collection of random images to grab your attention. Behold the names and dates of birth of my children/grandchildren/pet cats. Gaze with awe on this astronomically-suspect rendering of the constellation linked to my star sign. Feast your reluctant yet strangely captive eyes on this portrait of Taylor Swift. Yes, of course it’s Taylor Swift. What do you mean, Rod Stewart?’
This ‘look at me’ aspect of tattoos fits with the general tenor of the age. Everything is performative now, everything is on show, everything is about Me. Even when it isn’t. One of the most distasteful tattoos of all is to be found on David Blaine’s left forearm. It reads ‘174517’. Blaine had it done in ‘tribute’ to his hero, the author Primo Levi, who also had the number on his arm. But Levi’s tattoo wasn’t voluntary – it was his Auschwitz prisoner number, done by his captors.
Oh well. At least winter’s on the way, so some of these abominations are going to get covered up. Will the long-term trend continue? It looks pretty inked-in. I blame Samantha Cameron. She started it all with that dolphin on her right ankle. But I didn’t have any strong feelings about her one way or the other: the tattoo that really disappointed me was David Dimbleby’s. He was the fiercely intelligent yet twinkly-eyed purveyor of high-quality political broadcasting. Then he went and got a scorpion on his back. What’s the world coming to? At least it wasn’t a ‘tramp stamp’, the term reserved for tattoos across the lower back. When women have their name there the joke is that it’s so you can remember what to call her when … oh, you know.
You see, even the jokes about tattoos are vulgar. It’s fitting that the slang term is ‘tat’.
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