Keen Insights Into The Tattoo Craze

This article accurately describes the pathetic popularity of tattooing:

As the more defensive members of the over-inked community will recite with Pavlovian inevitability: ‘Tattoos have been here since before Jesus Christ.’ Indeed they have. Well before Jesus Christ, actually. And so have drought, war and pestilence. Your point is? ‘It’s about self-expression.’ No it isn’t, it’s specifically about your personal inability to express yourself married to a pathetic and fundamental predilection for inaction masked as a dramatic statement of intent or personality.

The half-educated amongst the dermatologically-afflicted usually go on to cite a long list of eminent people who you might not have expected to embrace ‘body art’: Winston Churchill, King George V, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Orwell and Thomas Edison among them – Edison, in fact, after his patent of the ‘electric pen’ in 1876, can be considered to be at least partly responsible for the whole modern pandemic of skin vandalism.

The difference, however, between these men and an idiot from Burnley or Billericay with a Maori warrior tattoo on his shoulder (to match the one on the rear window of his pimped-up Vauxhall Astra) is that the former group are not defined by the ink under their skin but, rather, by their achievements. You defeat Hitler, invent the light-bulb or write ‘1984’ and the design you have on your body is going to pale, or rather smudge, into insignificance.

Well said. Tattooing is for shallow people who are desperate to prove to the world that they are unique, but cannot find any genuine way of accomplishing it.