The Silverbloggers Chronicles - #17. Tattoos
When I was a child, tattoos were not well regarded. They were not seen as artistic creations but as marks worn by rebellious people and those who led dissolute lives.
There was one exception to this: young men who had served in the military or were currently serving. It was common for people who had been in the military to have a tattoo of their unit number, a bleeding heart, or an anchor. For them, it was a mark of identity.
The first tattoos I ever saw were on a young man who later became my aunt's husband. At the time, he was serving in the navy, and he was always very proud to come and visit us dressed in his white uniform. To me, he looked a lot like Popeye the sailor from the comic strips.
A few months into his military service, Daniel, as he was called, came to our house with a tattoo on his right hand. It was a small anchor, accompanied by four numbers at the bottom.
My grandmother and everyone in the house were very surprised to see him with the tattoo. My mother looked at him a little sideways, and you could see in her eyes that she was curious to ask him why he had gotten it, but no one said anything.
No one thought that because he had gotten the tattoo, Daniel was no longer a good boy. Although they didn't say it openly, I think the people in the house thought that the tattoo he had gotten was a symbol of masculinity. In general, that tattoo helped my family change their prejudices about people with tattoos a little.
The tattoo was quite crude, the general outline of the anchor was barely distinguishable, it was relatively small and clearly visible on Daniel's large hands.
One day I asked him if it was very painful to get the tattoo. He said it was more or less, but that it took quite a long time to do. The person who did it was another sailor who did tattoos for everyone in his unit. The procedure was rudimentary. They put Indian ink on the skin and, using a needle sterilized with a lighter, proceeded to prick the skin until the ink penetrated.
I listened to Daniel and imagined that the process must have been quite painful, much more than I could probably bear. I think that was when I decided I would never get a tattoo.
When my children reached adolescence, tattoos began to become fashionable. My daughter was the one who expressed the strongest desire to get one, but after discussing it several times, she understood that a tattoo was not something temporary, but a permanent mark. In the end, she decided not to get one.
A few years ago, I was surprised to see my eldest son at the beach with a tattoo on his upper back. When I looked closely, I realized that it had the names of his two daughters, my granddaughters, written on it. The tattoo looked like it had been done by a professional tattoo artist; the lines were very clean, and the arabesques of the letters were very beautiful.
I asked my son when he had gotten it, and he said he had had it for a few months. Suddenly, he had felt the urge to have the girls' names engraved on his skin.
I also have a nephew who decided not to buy a ring when he got married. Instead, he and his wife got tattoos on their fingers to simulate wedding rings. I thought that was a very original idea.
Another nephew of my wife's also has several tattoos on his body. And a niece of mine got a rather large tattoo at the end of her teenage years. It's a long poem that the tattoo artist didn't do very well. You have to get very close to read it, so it doesn't serve its purpose. So far, that niece hasn't found a way to replace that tattoo with another one. It seems that it's not easy.
The truth is that I've never been interested in getting a tattoo. Maybe I was a little traumatized by the story Daniel told me and didn't dare to try it.
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Back then having a tattoo was not a nice symbol. You would be judged by people around you😁. Now it's an art that some people admire😁
It's great of your daughter to understand the issue of not getting tattoos. I hope my daughter, who is about to be born, will also understand this when she grows up. We agree on many things regarding the subject.