Outside In | Millennials’ love of body art is breaking down tattoo taboos, but still wise to hide them at work

According to Johnny Depp: “My body is my journal, and my tattoos are my story.” I can only assume he never had a job interview – certainly not one in Hong Kong.

I have to confess a bias against them. It’s not a matter of the pain. It’s just the permanence of it all. After all, a butterfly flirtatiously perched on the buttock of a bikini-clad teenage beachgoer may look wonderful – but what kind of vision will it provide after four more decades have ravaged those neat teenage curves? And what chances of a second marriage when a guy sports a heart on his arm with “Jane” inscribed across it – unless of course the prospective girlfriend is, like his divorced wife, also called “Jane”?

But it seems as usual that I am behind the times. Among our millennials there is an explosion of interest in body art. Pew Research in the US says 40 per cent of millennials sport at least one tattoo. David Beckham may not quite be a millennial, but I understand he sports 34 of them. In the US alone, the tattoo business generated revenues of US$2.3 billion last year – 13 per cent up on 2014, according to the American Medical Association. Amid more than 100 tattoo conventions a year worldwide, Hong Kong just two weeks ago celebrated its fourth annual International Tattoo Convention, which organisers said attracted more than 200 tattoo artists from across the world, and almost 10,000 voyeurs – whoops, I mean visitors. That is more than double the number participating in 2015.

Since learning this fact, I am seeing them absolutely everywhere: delicately tracing a line around an ankle, creeping down over muscular arms, crawling up the neck out of sharp-buttoned shirts. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Again according to Pew, more than 70 per cent of those millennials sporting tattoos make sure they hide them at work. Sometimes it is just a discrete precaution against possible prejudice. Sometimes it is in response to specific company rules (many airlines not only have rules that no tattoos can show, but also have rules on under-garments that cover any tattoos that might be visible through a white shirt).

The simple reality remains that many still fear that visible tattoos will either kill employment prospects in a job interview, or block promotion within a company. A 2011 study by the publication CareerBuilder found that 31 per cent of surveyed employers would not promote an employee who wore a visible tattoo. In the US, a study at the University of Tampa found that 86 per cent of students with visible tattoos believed they would find it harder to get a job because of the tattoo. Ironically, the danger is real: anti-discrimination laws in most western economies protect against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or colour, but give no such protection when it comes to tattoos.

In some ways, the corporate prejudice seems odd. After all, tattooing has been around for a very long time. Oetzi the Ice Man discovered high in the Alps a few years ago carried tattoos from 5,000 years ago. Mummified remains sporting tattoos have been discovered from as far afield as Alaska, Siberia, Egypt, the Philippines and the Andes. And the earliest residents of the UK were called “painted people”, or Pritoni – from which the word Britain comes. The word tattoo comes from the Tahitian word “tatau”, meaning “to write”. Through time immemorial, Maoris from New Zealand have carried their “moko”, or unique facial tattoo as a sign of their unique identity and bravery. They even signed treaties with faithful renditions of their unique moko. No wonder the New Zealand All Blacks sport so many acres of finely honed body art.