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Suffer in silence tattoo3/22/2023 It is of course possible that younger generations will react against the elders whose status they wish to usurp by leaving their skin unblemished: after all, this is the basic mechanism of the fashion cycle. It could be argued that the very permanence of tattoos actually amounts to a sort of guarantee that they will never go completely out of style: too many people who are too invested in remaining fashionable have tattoos that they cannot get rid of to allow them to become uncool. ![]() Unlike Crocs, old tattoos cannot simply be donated to Goodwill when they stop being cool. When I was getting my first tattoo, I could not help imagining my dead, wrinkled, body lying in a coffin 60 years later, with the same rudimentary drawing (a pair of dice) still tattooed on it. The most obvious difference between tattoos and more traditional fashion phenomena is the fact that tattoos are permanent. The question I wish to address in this essay is the following: are tattoos a passing fashion trend like any other? Or is there some qualitative difference between tattoos and other ephemeral fashion phenomena like Crocs or bell bottoms? Can the sudden explosion in popularity of tattooing in the early 1990’s, an explosion that, 20 years later, shows no signs of abating, be articulated with some deeper mutation in the nature of the social bond? Lastly, can psychoanalysis shed any light on this phenomenon? I am not an outlaw, just one more guy who wants to look cool while still being able to work in a professional environment. They acquired their tattoos at a time when having a tattoo still identified you as an honest-to-God outlaw. Whenever I see old bikers with armloads of tattoos, I immediately feel bad for them.
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