University of Bucharest

Badescu Eliza, S1, Advanced

Showing your true color
Ooooo tats.. Love them!
For me tattoos mean expressing yourself, showing your believes, the things you love,
the things that makes you special, different from the others.
I also have a tattoo on my right arm just below my hand with the peace symbol. For
my family wasnt a big impact that I wanted to do the tattoo because they also have some. I
grew up with my grandpas old style tattoo of a naked pin-up on his arm so my family doesnt
have anymore that conception where tattooed people are consider dangerous, ex-prisoners or
being part of a infamous gang.
But this way of thinking existed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because
before being fashion accessories and used to enhance the body, tattoos were associated with
outcast and criminality. Particularly, in North America, tattoos have been associated with
stereotypes and racism. Many prisoners and criminal gangs use distinctive tattoos to indicate
facts about their criminal behavior, prison sentences, and organizational affiliation, known by
us especially from Hollywood movies. For example a teardrop tattooed, on the face is usually
associated with how many people a person has murdered. Cat tattoo: a career as thief.: single
cat means the bearer worked alone; several cats mean the bearer was part of a gang.
Madonna and baby Jesus indicates the person has been a thief since childhood and a dagger:
sex offender. I also found out from my uncle that five dots tattooed on the hand represents the
prisoner between the four walls of the cell.
You can also have a tattoo in order to show your membership to different subcultures
The best example in my opinion is the yakuza tattoos which represents the subculture of the
japanese mafia. The members are covered in tattoos named full body tattoos or body suit,
from their neck to the hands and foot. The tattoos are realized in the japanese traditional way
named irezumi and they picture koy fish, samurai, cherry blossom, waves traditional
japanese symbols.
Another negative association is with the Nazi, the Holocaust period. Back then the
inmates of the concentrations camps were forcibly tattooed with a number, code for the
identification system, taging prisoners.
You can tattoo everything you want from flowers to musicians, from pets to famous
paintings, from monster to egyptian letters, anything you may imagine can become a tattoo.
They represent pure work of arts (of course not every amateur tattoo is art) made by talented
tattoo artist in grays or color. Personally I prefer black and white tattoo, because the colored
ones are too flashy; for me the colored inks are kind of neon and bright.
Nowadays people moved on from the negative association but I know that there are
still people thinking in that way. But this is it, you have to let it get by and express yourself
the way you want. More and more persons get tattooed and statistics show it also. In
September 2006, the Pew Research Center found that 36% of Americans ages 1825, 40% of
those 26-40 and 10% of those 41-64 had a tattoo. In Romania, I think that the two shows from
Discovery channel : Miami Ink and L.A. Ink had a huge impact : tones of tattoo shops
opened, the number of inked people increase and the thinking is no longer in stereotype terms.
With the wave of embracing tattoos also came modern methods to tattoo, they got
upgraded : you find more easily electric tattoo machines, better inks with carbon based
pigments, more hygienic work stations and special created creams for the aftercare.
Even more, in recent years, also tattoos received a new shade : you can have an eye
tattoo. The tattooing of the sclera, its an extreme practice which consists in injecting dye into
the sclera, the white part of the eye. You can now transform your eyes : have blue, yellow, red
or black eyes like demons, but the procedure is very risky and complications like blindness
may appear. So tattoos are in constant evolution so you never know what might pop out in the
future.