1. A permanent mark or design made on the skin by a process of pricking and ingraining an indelible pigment or by raising scars.
2. A design made on the skin with a temporary dye such as henna or ink.

Prior to the almost random tattoo we see today on people, especially in the United States, (and even parts Europe are starting to buy into the trend a bit) the symbols and designs displayed on the skin had a meaning of sorts, that spoke of beliefs, status, and beauty.
Of course most of these practices were outside the colonial European powers that would eventually influence the world, and shape it much to the form (political at least) that we know it today.
For a long time, the art of tattoo on the body was thought pagan, primitive and uncivilized by most of the new industrial world.

In the America’s, only the Indian population marked their skin. Throughout the French/Belgian and British Empires it was the East Indians and Africans that held such practices. It was never a Western practice until recently.

Probably sometime during the early nineteen-sixties, as social constraints were stretched and eventually shattered, the tattoo began to build a slow momentum. By the nineteen-seventies, the tattoo became synonymous with the ‘outlaw’ image, the rebel with or without a cause. When the nineteen-eighties rolled around, tattooing started to become a little more acceptable to law-abiding citizens, though most were still seen a social rebels at the very least. When nineteen-ninety rolled around, the tattoo began to spark like a fuse, and exploded into fashion in the late nineties.

We now see the tattoo as quite a normal thing in the Western world. What a difference one hundred years make.
Now it is commonplace in the West, and the original cultures of the America’s, Asia and Africa hardly do it at all anymore, as the old traditions, cultures and way of life slowly fade.

That being said, it is important to understand the significance of a tattoo. It cannot, or at least should not be a random act by one infatuated with a cool design. It is something that will last a lifetime, and thereby becomes something that should signify your life, at its very deepest root.

And so it is that I recently got one myself.

What is it, and where is it?
Well, you’ll have to come see!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005 at 6:53 am and is filed under Front, Life and Death. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.