I recently found myself embroiled in a minor Facebook altercation when a friend pondered the wisdom of getting something ‘flowery and delicate’ tattooed on her wrist as a post-30 crisis action, and someone suggested she try out the exclusive new Chanel range of temporary tattoos to see if she liked the idea. I responded, not surprisingly, with a fuming explosion of outrage at the way tattoos have become a fashion item. The friend, having known me for some years, was amused; the fellow commenter was a little taken aback. (“Why the vitriol?” Darling. You may as well ask why I breathe.)
I like tattoos. I like them enough to have a few. I’ll freely admit that part of my annoyance at the current ubiquity of tattoos has to do with the fact that every third person is covered with twinkly stars, which wasn’t the case when I started getting mine 12 years ago, but that’s not the whole of it. (And anyway my stars aren’t twinkly. They’re mean and hard. Like ninja stars.) I take my tattoos quite seriously. Each of them marks something extremely meaningful in my life, from the memorial to a magnificent friend to the one I got at 10pm on a Friday night in Hackney while sipping whiskey out of the bottle with a straw.
Having tattoos when you’re Jewish takes some forethought. Experts disagree on whether they’re actually verboten or not, and there’s a pervasive myth that you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery if you’re tattooed, but the fact is that, post-Holocaust, tattoos on Jews have some fairly atrocious connotations. I know that my grandparents, bless their memories, would have been horrified, and it’s been difficult for my parents to deal with because, to them as well, ink on Jews means one thing only.
But for me tattooing’s been a way of taking ownership of my body. As a kid who was fairly uncomfortable in my skin, getting that first star etched between my shoulderblades by a rude sailor type on the Portobello Road when I was twenty years old felt a lot like writing my name in a book. This is mine, is what I was saying. It was an extension of all the agonising late nights of trying to pierce my own nose/ears/belly button, all the stupid colours I’d dyed my adolescent hair, all the dumb outfits I’d been wearing. It was a way of owning myself. I don’t know whether my disconnection from my body was cultural, although I think a lot of women feel that way, or particular to me because I didn’t look like I was supposed to look (chubby and clever and odd instead of sweet and petite and feminine), but either way it took me the first section of my life to get comfortable in my skin, and tattoos played a notable part in that.
I realise it’s unreasonable to expect the rest of the world to have the same sub-mystical relationship with this stuff that I do, and that flouncing about being curmudgeonly just because everyone’s doing them reveals nothing more than my advancing age. But I find it disconcerting; when did we get so offhand about our bodies that we permanently mark them without thinking about it? When did skin become so undervalued, so un-precious, that spending five minutes picking some faux-tribal nonsense out of a flip file and having it engraved on your body forever began to seem like a reasonable thing to do? It’s not so much the popularity of tattoos that annoys me, and it’s not that I think they should remain an exclusive club for ex-goths who had tricky adolescences. Rather it’s the so-hip-it-hurts aspect I have a problem with. Yeah, this stuff is cool now. But the whole point of fashion is that it changes. What sort of weird culture are we fostering when people blithely do something that’s inherently permanent to suit something that’s inherently temporary? Using our bodies this casually says some less than pleasant things about how shallow we’ve become, how little care of the self we teach our kids.
Which brings me rather neatly back to Chanel. Yes, I will say it out loud: I have a problem with the consumerist mainstream co-opting the symbols that people have developed to mark themselves out from the consumerist mainstream. I realise that makes me into something of a Luddite, but that’s no surprise. Where fashion goes, everyone else will follow. Anorexic models equal anorexic schoolgirls. How long before Primark sets up in-house tattoo studios where you can take your 16-year-old to get a swirly pattern above her not-going-to-be-that-pert-forever arse? And where on earth do we go from there? I’d prefer less Polly Vernon in my William Gibson, thanks.
(I was going to illustrate this post with photos of my own tattoos but came to the eventual conclusion that that’s a little too self-aggrandising, even for someone who assumes the whole internet is interested in her opinions)
