Tattoos are forever, but cool

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Tattoos are forever, but cool
March 19, 2011
by Bob Beatler
TheSun News.com

A recent brief flirtation with Facebook - and that is what it was, a brief flirtation - put me in easy reach of my son and his family in Illinois.

It was then that I learned that my 21-year-old grandson now has a magnificent tattoo covering his back.

I sent him a message telling him it looked pretty cool, which it did, and as I wrote it I realized that I had come a long way, baby, in the past 25 years.

It was in the mid-'80s that his teenage father had come home with a small tattoo of a rose on his upper arm.

To say I went a little bonkers is putting it mildly:

"What have you done? Are you crazy? Tattoos are for sailors and bikers. You'll never get a good job. You'll never be able to go to the beach..."

Like that.

I recalled my own tattoo temptation during my Marine Corps days. I thought seriously about getting the USMC globe and anchor on my forearm, but thankfully held off until the moment passed. OK, I didn't have any money and I knew it would hurt. Some Marine, huh?

As far as my son was concerned, the joke was on me. Turned out he became a sailor, spending 20 years in the Navy. He still works for the Navy as a civilian and now rides a Harley-Davidson to work. He still has his rose tattoo and I still love him.

I guess my own conversion to the world of tattoos came a few years ago during a vacation to Key West with my wife and daughter.

One afternoon, while I played golf at Key West's only golf course, they found a tattoo parlor - do they still call them that? - and my daughter got a small, discreetly placed tattoo of a scorpion. I cringed but had to admit it was pretty cute.

By then, of course, tattoos were no longer taboo and were actually taking their place in the mainstream of American culture.

A Pew Center survey in 2006 found that 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 26 and 40 had been tattooed.

In an attempt to explain the phenomenon, photographer Chris Rainer, who has collected and published thousands of photos of tattooed people, recently told Smithsonian magazine:

"We live in a culture where everything is disposable, and it's like, 'Wow, that's forever.'"

Yes, and to me that's still the scary part.