It’s the Culture, Grampa

Bryan and I were at our weekly breakfast at La Madelaine in the Galleria. As usual, he had quiche and coffee and I had toast and coffee. When we finished our second cups, I asked if there was anything he wanted to buy. He said there was a card shop on the second floor of Galleria 2 where he wanted to look for something; just the place for a sixteen year-old.

While he shopped, I watched the cashier. She was a teen-ager, thin, dressed in a dark blouse and pants. She was not attractive, a state made worse by uncombed hair and her failure to smile. And her tattoos, around her neck and her wrists, shocked me. They were green and irregular, looking like colored barbed wire. What in the world had she done to herself?

As we walked out the door, I asked Bryan if he had noticed the tattoos. He said he had. I asked how he felt about them. He shrugged his shoulders. I told him I thought they were ugly and predicted that when she grew up to be a young lady, she would be sorry that she had disfigured her body and would not be able to reverse the damage except at great cost and pain.

Demonstrating wisdom beyond his years, he set me straight, “It’s the culture, Grampa.” He was telling me that my view of tattooing lagged far behind the changes that were going on around me. This had nothing to do with Maori natives and the natives of Papua New Guinea and professional wrestlers and basketball and football players with colorful decorations on their bodies. This was a teenager who looked upon tattooing as part of her makeup like lipstick or a piece of jewelry or hairdo except that it was permanent.

I began to be more aware of body art---a leaf on the ankle, a butterfly on the shoulder, an arrow on the small of the back, a heart on the side of the neck. I viewed them as cute, still limited to the young and daring. But would members of the upper crust, the wealthy, the powerful do this to their bodies? The answer came in a profile in the October 21, 2011 issue of The New Yorker of Jill Abramson, the newly appointed editor of The New York Times. She confessed that at one time when she had been transferred from her beloved New York to California to a new position, she had a tattoo of a subway token, “good for one trip” inked on her body. She won’t tell where it is; no matter, tattooing has arrived and is definitely part of our culture.