Make Mine A Butterfly
Tattoo fever has reached the stage where you’re expected to apologise for your lack of one. “I just never got around to it,” or “I have a phobia about needles,” you bleat, feeling under-dressed, unadventurous and inhibited. Tattoos are so mainstream now that it’s the people without a decorative little something inked on their skin who find themselves asked to explain this extraordinary absence. But it’s not exactly a sign of rebellion any more, between the persistent rumour that Prince Charles has one and half the Eurovision contestants flashing their body art.
Where two or three are gathered together, sooner or later they start comparing hearts and butterflies. It’s a competitive business – no longer a case of do you have one but how many did you run to and what expanse of flesh is covered? Once people found a hairdresser or tailor they liked and shared the name selectively with friends, now it’s their tattoo artist.
I blame celebs – well, they’re the ones we want to emulate, not sea dogs or Maori warriors. Tattooing up in their image is an inexpensive way to copy an idol. Pamela Anderson’s barbed wire arm band spawned a generation of copycats, while Eminem’s dog tags around his neck have their imitators. (The rapper also has “slit here” on his right wrist, a tattoo that hasn’t caught on quite so readily.) Some people see a tattoo as a gesture of devotion. I know mature women whose knees tremble at the ‘romance’ of Pete Doherty’s heart with K inside it – their own men are made to feel lacking in commitment for not hustling off to the nearest tattoo parlour.
Angelina Jolie is the high priestess of body art, with more tattoos than fingers and toes. Apparently it takes an hour a day to cover up her dragons and other symbols when she’s shooting a film. I often wonder if she and Brad got together when she invited him to come up and see her tattoos some time. Imagine having more tattoos than your boyfriend – times have definitely changed. Tattoo is one of the most entered word on Internet search engines. You can even see actress Christina Ricci being tattooed on the net – she has a lion on her shoulder, a bat on her bikini line and a bouquet of sweet peas on her back, a perplexing combination of images.
It doesn’t seem so long ago that the only people with tattoos were Hell’s Angels. Now the sort of women with kitchen disinfectant spray in their cupboards and ironed leisure wear in their wardrobes are having tattoos to celebrate their 40th birthdays. No longer a walk on the wild side, then. And they’re going along with their teenage daughters to choose tattoos together, in a surreal mother-child bonding ritual.
Tattoos always strike me as an addiction: one is never enough. People start with a daisy around the toe of one foot – like Britney – and before they know it they have half a Rain Forest. Personally I’ve always preferred to make mistakes that can be rectified without resorting to laser treatment. But obviously I also go about feeling under-dressed, unadventurous and inhibited.
