LIKE many of you, I subscribe to Skin & Ink, the monthly magazine for tattoo enthusiasts. But I don't have any tattoos of my own. And I never will.
To me, tattoos have a kind of fascinating, morbid permanence. Tattooed people seem to have a set of priorities, and indeed aesthetics, that are beyond my comprehension, like the ring-necked Padaung people of Burma. We know a Padaung woman thinks she's more beautiful looking like an gooseneck desk lamp, but come on! When I was growing up, people with tattoos were of one type. They drank cheap beer and arm-wrestled at funerals. They were missing at least one tooth and proud of it. They had a history of mercenary military operations. They picked their teeth with Harley-Davidson spark plugs. Most had committed murder.
The men were even more unsavoury.
Part of my aversion stems from the connection between skin doodles and the criminal fraternity. Once a professor friend of mine went to a Japanese bathhouse and found himself next to a naked yakuza, a man with ritual tattoos decorating every centimetre of his skin - at least, as far as he could tell. My friend could not get close enough to find out if every single centimetre was decorated.
You don't get that close to a yakuza.
In recent years, tattoos have become popular among people who would not get far in the yakuza, the triads or the Hell's Angels. The trend among these much more genteel people is to have a little picture of a bird, or perhaps a rose, usually in a place that can be covered over for a job interview. The idea is to be at once daring and safe.