Only in Ameriki Folks Only in Ameriki Fat Arses and Bad Ink

And that's the back if you're still trying to work it out.

Two more for my No Regerts post.

Bad Tattoos & Family Pics Team Jimmy Joe

You Wouldn't Hang it on Your Wall - Ink

You wouldn't hang it on your wall, why on earth would you hang it on your body?

Why tattoos make my flesh crawl

The tattoo has always been a mark of powerlessness, not individuality. And now everyone’s got one.
By Neil Davenport.
September 18 2012

Joanna Southgate’s heavily tattooed arms caused a stir at Royal Ascot last week. Apparently, the 34-year-old sneaked in and avoided being told to cover them up. In a discussion piece last Sunday, an Observer journalist argued that tattoos like Southgate’s can be beautiful and a work of art in their own right. Novelist and journalist Rachel Johnson, however, declared that they simply lacked style and elegance. If they’re not good enough for actress Kristin Scott Thomas, she declared, they’re not good enough for any stylish woman. In the Mirror, Tony Parsons also declared that tattoos were a depressing eyesore and that Britain has become a ‘tattooed nation’.

For once, I’m with Parsons. In Britain, when the sun comes out, so do the tattoos. Acres and acres of flesh vandalised by grubby-looking ink daubings: martial-arts symbols, nude dancers, flowers and roses, Guns’n’Roses, dolphins, dogs and loved ones’ names scrawled in Sanskrit. Tattoos used to be a subcultural expression of criminals, sailors and hard men. Now everyone, from footballers to the prime minister’s wife, has their body adorned in artwork last seen on a Prog-Rock album sleeve. To describe them as lurid would be an understatement, which is a word probably hated and feared in tattoo parlours everywhere.

So what’s going on? How did we arrive at a situation whereby not having a tattoo is now a sign of daring rebellion? While sitting in a pub garden recently, I realised I was about the only person whose flesh could be considered a blank canvas. Nor will I be getting my arms mutilated anytime soon. Apart from tattoos looking hideously ugly, they are also indicative of a person’s insularity. No doubt having a tattoo is widely seen as a mark of individuality and personal expression; that is, you have altered your body’s appearance to demonstrate something about yourself. As one blogger put it recently, ‘a tattoo is a life story. And with a virgin skin you obviously don’t have a life.’

Yet there’s more going on here than questionable aesthetic tastes. With tattoos, the emphasis is all on the self, and the centrality of the self, rather than anything outside of the body. You may not be in a position to make a mark on the outside world, or even on your local community, but at least you can leave a mark on your own body. In a deeply narcissistic age, self-aggrandising tattoos have become the body badge of choice for thousands. But by enlarging ourselves with tattoos, we’re belittling ourselves in the process. It’s a sign of our low expectations that having control over flesh decorations is considered to be the limit of our capacities as an individual. So while shaping the outside world seems near impossible, you can at least shape barbed-wire patterns on your arm.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Historically, tattoos have long been part of subcultures in which fundamental social change was dismissed. During the postwar period, tattoos were associated with rock’n’roll outlaw chic: the greaser, the rocker and the Hell’s Angels. In other words, tattoos were associated with an ‘outsider’ form of ‘cool’. And yet, the original definition of ‘cool’ was to be decidedly icy about the struggles between left and right, socialism and conservatism, workers and bosses. It was to be cool about the possibilities of human progress achieved through social transformation. To display your tattoos was to elevate the self over any commitment to engaging with and changing society.

Of course in an age where human progress has little positive meaning, it’s not surprising that ‘cool’, in its anti-political sense, has become so widespread. But the emptying out of politics has also gone hand-in-hand with a rejection of civilised mainstream values, too. Increasingly, universal standards in public life, from formality of speech to ‘dressing for an occasion’, are seen as irritating, even offensive, reminders of stuffy Old Britain. Anyone who questions the dismantling of such universal standards is seen as an out-of-touch reactionary who needs to ‘chillax’.

Public displays of tattoos, such as swallows on hands to denote having ‘done bird’, were often a sad display of self-loathing by marginalised individuals in society. In the early 1980s, lumpenised punks and skinheads would also have a ‘cut here’ tattoo dotted around their throat. A mixture of personal degradation and outlaw status has, historically, provided tattoos with their shock value.

In recent years, such shock value has now taken the form of the neck tattoo, where huge ink daubings have no place to hide. The comedy writer Armando Iannucci recently said on Twitter that neck tattoos must be ‘the worst sort of career move going’. But that is exactly why some individuals have them; it is a defiant rejection of the formalised dress codes required to advance in most workplaces, a tattooed sneer at the uptight world of white-collar work and ‘office drones’.

Imagining yourself on the margins, and not at the centre of society, is why tattoos have become so popular. Whether it is refusing to hold down a job or, in the middle classes’ case, rejecting bourgeois values, significant sections of society want to vacate the public sphere. Just like the historically isolated social groups with which tattoo wearers seek identification, today a lot of people want to be outside contemporary society. In effect, tattoos are a celebration of powerlessness and marginalisation. Getting tattooed up is simply a way of putting ourselves down.

Neil Davenport is a politics teacher based in London. He blogs at The Midnight Bell.

From hero to zero: Lewis Hamilton. Not only that, he's got Jesus.

Ink: A Mother's Tale

It was only two months ago that I ran a post on tattoos where I had this to say:

There's No Taste Like Bad Taste - No Regerts: Insane Ink

To say I am no lover of ink, would, I have to admit, be putting it rather mildly.

Given that 99.99% don't pass the acid test, 'would you hang the same thing on your wall?' then I suppose it's hardly surprising.

I think the wearing of cringe-worthy tats must surpass any other single human activity in the world, but I think I reserve a special place, a special abhorrence, for those that adorn the bodies of young chicks.

To see the most beautiful work of art that exists in the world bar none, the body of a young female in her prime, desecrated by some ghastly tattoo or other, really makes me want to weep. What a travesty, to turn something so lovely into something ruined forever. More

So it will hardly come as a surprise that the author of this piece, a mother of a twenty one year old boy, has my fullest understanding and sympathy.

Just one little tattoo
Tess Morgan
11 August 2012

When Tess Morgan's son came home with a tattoo, she was griefstricken. She knew her reaction was OTT (he's 21) but it signalled a change in their relationship

Put out the bunting, crack open the beers, stand there in the kitchen smiling from ear to ear, because he's home – our student son is home and the family is together again. And after supper, after the washing up is done, the others – his younger siblings – drift off to watch television, and he says: "Would you like to see my tattoo?"

I say, "You're joking."

He says, "No, I'm not."

But still I wait. Any minute he's going to laugh and say, "You should see your faces" because this has been a running joke for years, this idea of getting a tattoo – the hard man act, iron muscles, shaved head, Jason Statham, Ross Kemp. He's a clever boy. Maybe during his school years he thought a tattoo would balance the geeky glory of academic achievement.

His father says, "Where?"

"On my arm," he says, and touches his bicep through his shirt.

His lovely shoulder.

In the silence, he says, "I didn't think you'd be this upset."

After a while, he says, "It wasn't just a drunken whim. I thought about it. I went to a professional. It cost £150."

£150? I think, briefly, of all the things I could buy with £150.

"It's just a tattoo," he says, when the silence goes on so long that we have nearly fallen over the edge of it into a pit of black nothingness. "It's not as if I came home and said I'd got someone pregnant."

It seems to me, unhinged by shock, that this might have been the better option.

His father asks, "Does it hurt?"

"Yes," I say, cutting across this male bonding. "It does. Very much."

For three days, I can't speak to my son. I can hardly bear to look at him. I decide this is rational. The last thing we need, I think, is an explosion of white-hot words that everyone carries around for the rest of their lives, engraved on their hearts. In any case, I'm not even sure what it is I want to say. In my mind's eye I stand there, a bitter old woman with pursed lips wringing my black-gloved hands. He's done the one thing that I've said for years, please don't do this. It would really upset me if you did this. And now it's happened. So there's nothing left to say.

I know you can't control what your children do. Why would you want to, anyway? If you controlled what they did, you'd just pass on your own rubbish tip of imperfections. You hope the next generation will be better, stronger, more generous. I know all you can do as a parent is to pack their bags and wave as you watch them go.

So I cry instead. I have a lump in my throat that stops me from eating. I feel as if someone has died. I keep thinking of his skin, his precious skin, inked like a pig carcass.

My neighbour says, "There's a lot of it about. So many teenagers are doing it." I stare at pictures of David Beckham with his flowery sleeves, Angelina Jolie all veins and scrawls. Tattoos are everywhere. They seem no more alternative than piercings these days. But I still don't understand. Sam Cam with her smudgy dolphin, the heavily tattooed at Royal Ascot – these people are role models?

"My niece had doves tattooed on her breasts," says a friend, "And her father said, you wait, in a few years' time they'll be vultures."

It's the permanence that makes me weep. As if the Joker had made face paints from acid. Your youthful passion for ever on display, like a CD of the Smiths stapled to your forehead. The British Association of Dermatologists recently surveyed just under 600 patients with visible tattoos. Nearly half of them had been inked between the ages of 18 and 25, and nearly a third of them regretted it.

I look up laser removal. Which is a possibility, I think miserably, that only works if you want a tattoo removed. And I'm not in charge here. My son is.

My husband asks, "Have you seen it yet?"

I shake my head. Like a child, I am hoping that if I keep my eyes tightly shut the whole thing will disappear.

"It's his body," he says gently. "His choice."

"But what if he wants to be a lawyer?"

"A lawyer?"

"Or an accountant."

"He'll be wearing a suit. No one will ever know. And he doesn't want to be a lawyer. Or an accountant."

I know. I know.

I meet a colleague for lunch. "He knew how much it would hurt me," I say, tears running down my face. "For years I've said, don't do it. It's there for ever, even after you've changed your mind about who you are and what you want to look like. You're branded, like meat. It can damage your work prospects. It can turn people against you before you've even opened your mouth."

She says, "Tell him how you feel."

But I can't. For a start, I know I'm being completely unreasonable. This level of grief is absurd. He's not dying, he hasn't killed anyone, he hasn't volunteered to fight on behalf of a military dictatorship. But I feel as though a knife is twisting in my guts.

I get angry with myself. This is nothing but snobbery, I think – latent anxiety about the trappings of class. As if my son had deliberately turned his back on a light Victoria sponge and stuffed his face with cheap doughnuts. I am aware, too, that I associate tattoos on men with aggression, the kind of arrogant swagger that goes with vest tops, dogs on chains, broken beer glasses.

Is this what other women feel? Or perhaps, I think, with an uncomfortable lurch of realisation, just what older women feel. I stand, a lone tyrannosaurus, bellowing at a world I don't understand.

Tattoos used to be the preserve of criminals and toffs. And sailors. In the 1850s, the corpses of seamen washed up on the coast of north Cornwall were "strangely decorated" with blue, according to Robert Hawker, the vicar of Morwenstow – initials, or drawings of anchors, flowers or religious symbols ("Our blessed Saviour on His Cross, with on the one hand His mother, and on the other St John the Evangelist"). "It is their object and intent, when they assume these signs," says Hawker, "to secure identity for their bodies if their lives are lost at sea."

Tattoos, then, were intensely practical, like brightly coloured smit marks on sheep.

Perhaps even then this was a fashion statement, a badge of belonging. Or just what you did after too much rum. Later, the aristocracy flirted with body art. According to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (they know a lot about tattoos), Edward VII had a Jerusalem cross on his arm while both his sons, the Duke of Clarence and the Duke of York (later George V), had dragon tattoos. Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston's mum, had a snake on her wrist.

But you can do what you like if you're rich.

On day three, still in a fog of misery, I say to him, "Shall we talk?"

We sit down with cups of coffee. I open my mouth to speak and end up crying instead. I say, "You couldn't have done anything to hurt me more."

He is cool and detached. He says, "I think you need to re-examine your prejudices."

I think, but I have! I've done nothing else for three days! But I don't say that because we aren't really talking to each other. These are rehearsed lines, clever insults flung across the dispatch box. (This is what comes of not exploding in anger in the heat of the moment.)

I say, "Why couldn't you have waited until you'd left home? Why now when you're living here half the year?"

"It's something I've been thinking about for a long time. There didn't seem any reason to wait."

Which makes it worse.

"I'm an adult," he says. "I paid for it with my own money. Money I earned."

But we're supporting you as well, I think. As far as I know, you don't have separate bank accounts for your various income streams. So who knows? Maybe we paid for it. "If you don't want to see it, that's fine," he says. "When I'm at home, I'll cover it up. Your house, your rules."

In my head, I think, I thought it was your house, too.

He says, "I'm upset that you're upset. But I'm not going to apologise."

"I don't want you to apologise," I say. (A lie. Grovelling self-abasement might help.)

He says, "I'm still the same person."

I look at him, sitting there, my 21-year-old son. I feel I'm being interviewed for a job I don't even want. I say, "But you're not. You're different. I will never look at you in the same way again. It's a visceral feeling. Maybe because I'm your mother. All those years of looking after your body – taking you to the dentist and making you drink milk and worrying about green leafy vegetables and sunscreen and cancer from mobile phones. And then you let some stranger inject ink under your skin. To me, it seems like self-mutilation. If you'd lost your arm in a car accident, I would have understood. I would have done everything to make you feel better. But this – this is desecration. And I hate it."

We look at each other. There seems nothing left to say.

Over the next few days, my son – always covered up – talks to me as if the row had never happened. I talk to him, too, but warily. Because I'm no longer sure I know him.

And this is when I realise that all my endless self-examination was completely pointless. What I think, or don't think, about tattoos is irrelevant. Because this is the point. Tattoos are fashionable. They may even be beautiful. (Just because I hate them doesn't mean I'm right.) But by deciding to have a tattoo, my son took a meat cleaver to my apron strings. He may not have wanted to hurt me. I hope he didn't. But my feelings, as he made his decision, were completely unimportant.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.

I am redundant. And that's a legitimate cause for grief, I think.

Tess Morgan is a pseudonym Gruniad

There's No Taste Like Bad Taste - No Regerts: Insane Ink

 Update: Do strap in. Link


To say I am no lover of ink, would, I have to admit, be putting it rather mildly.

Given that 99.99% don't pass the acid test, 'would you hang the same thing on your wall?' then I suppose it's hardly surprising.

I think the wearing of cringe-worthy tats must surpass any other single human activity in the world, but I think I reserve a special place, a special abhorrence, for those that adorn the bodies of young chicks.

To see the most beautiful work of art that exists in the world bar none, the body of a young female in her prime, desecrated by some ghastly tattoo or other, really makes me want to weep. What a travesty, to turn something so lovely into something ruined forever.

But it is not the tats of young gals per say, that concern us in this post from nowhere, stumbling across the subject as I did after reading the latest shenanigans of James Murdoch. But rather those tats that leave us slowly shaking the head, those tats that are a testimony to shear stupidity of the wearer, those tats that give normal bad taste a good name.

Although there are thousands of far worse examples to be found on the web, I am just going to offer up the two and then leave you a couple of links to wander round. The first being the one that the Mail led with, hence the 'No Regerts' in the title, and the other! well I don't really know what to make of it.

It's one thing I suppose, to totally ignore the fact that the Jackson tattoo that these cretins so proudly wear, is that of a fucking paedophile, but to actually celebrate the fact, by having a depiction of Jackson abusing a kid tattooed on your leg, is quite frankly, beyond fucking belief.



"He touched so many" have these people no fucking brains whatsoever?

No regerts? Well maybe a few....These tacky tattoos have been singled out as ugliest yet

Mis-spelt tattoo adorning a woman's side must fill her with regret every time she sees it

Tattoo revival prompts online posts featuring increasing number of horrendous choices Blah blah The Wail

The Mail's article prompted me to have a look at a few things, of those in a moment, but first two links to articles dedicated to Michael Jackson tattoos. The first, perhaps more than the second, endorsing what I said earlier about the ruination of something beautiful.

Michael Jackson Tattoo of the Day

15 of the worst Michael Jackson tattoos Seemingly there is quite a bit more on this fellow's blog, most of it celebrating bad taste. I shall check it out myself as soon as I have posted this. Update: I would almost say it's mandatory, but I will defy anyone who thinks they can get past half a page.

Two other things I did have a look at, Google Image them yourself if you want a bit of an eye opener. Safe search off of course, censorship not being part of my personal philosophy, try extreme tattoo and extreme body-building.

Of course, it's all in the best possible taste.