Tattoos are everywhere these days. What are we expressing with this new vision of beauty, that calls for the tattoo to complete it? Until a few decades ago in the West, tattoos were associated mostly with sailors, prisoners, gang members, soldiers and carnival performers.
When I was a child, the only tattoos I saw were those that decorated men of my father's age who had been sailors. Their eagles and pinups evoked a shadowy, faraway male world of combat, danger, foreign ports and drunken brawls in red-light districts. In the 1940s, tattoos were sometimes called travel marks, and many of them did seem like exotically tawdry souvenirs.
In Japan, the ancient art of irezumi has had a similarly unsavory underworld connotation, and although the Japanese style of tattooing has strongly influenced the contemporary tattoos being done in the West, here there is still a stigma associated with the old-fashioned style. Interestingly, the trendy tattoos now in Japan are stylistic imports, similar to those seen in the U.S. and Europe.