But if we can read modernity’s soul at all, surely it is through the stigmata of the moment: proliferating tattoos. Tattoos are everywhere on the bodies of Americans; all of us know someone who keeps imprinting and imprinting his flesh in an endless gesture of self-expression.
Flannery O’Connor’s 1965 short story, “Parker’s Back,” describes an obsessive body-imprinter:
[Parker’s] dissatisfaction [was] acute, and raged in him. It was as if the panther and the lion and the serpents and the eagles and the hawks [on his skin] had penetrated his skin and lived inside him in a raging warfare … Whenever Parker couldn’t stand the way he felt, he would have another tattoo… With the aid of mirrors [an] artist had tattooed on the top of his head a miniature owl.
Parker’s pièce de résistance is a huge image, on his back, of the “haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes.”
O’Connor’s observation that Parker’s tattoos seemed to have “penetrated his skin and lived inside him” prefigures, in an intriguing way, the recent much-discussed scientific study which finds that tattoos are “associated with an increased risk of malignant lymphoma.”
This conclusion, which surprised UD not at all (“[W]hen the tattoo ink is injected into the skin, the body interprets this as something foreign that should not be there and the immune system is activated. A large part of the ink is transported away from the skin, to the lymph nodes where it is deposited.”), has upset and shocked people; and indeed when close to 35% of your population has tattoos, you can expect this result.
But of course tattoos have long been known to predispose people toward infections, allergies, MRI problems, etc. The study’s authors next intend to examine links between tattoos and “other forms of cancer and inflammatory diseases.”
Many people covered with this deeply penetrative ink seem unconcerned, and that is possibly because the dark business of engaging in activities you know to be harmful (see also vaping) is your self-expression. That is your far and soulful country — the vampire God you bear on your back.
May 30th, 2024 at 3:41PM
Deeply countercultural thoughts. No one under 40 is allowed to criticize tattoos, no matter how reptilian the people above criticism begin to look with them.
But, smoking and tattooing are not analogous. Smoking is very physically and socially pleasant, like drinking. Tattooing is apparently extremely physically painful, and makes you look scary and antisocial to others. So, both consciously kinds of self-harm, but people don’t usually smoke for the sake of the harm; it’s just an undesirable long-term side effect of the pleasure.
May 30th, 2024 at 5:01PM
I see the distinction, and you’re right; but vaping is very special, very luridly destructive, behavior. It’ll ruin your lungs really fast.
Between the tattoo removal trend and increasing attacks on tattoos, I’m not sure how countercultural I’m being.
May 30th, 2024 at 8:19PM
Would be great if tattoos were under more attack, but conservative moralists aren’t going to convince my lizard people friends that they look awful.
Hm, I’ve never vaped, so I don’t know. Why is it categorically different from smoking cigarettes? Bc people who do it do it more constantly? They insist it’s much healthier than cigarettes. It’s true that one doesn’t share a vape, at least that I have seen, in the same sociable ways that they share cigarettes and lighters and stand around together talking while smoking.
June 6th, 2024 at 6:54AM
There does seem to be a downturn:
https://nypost.com/2024/06/05/lifestyle/gen-z-has-turned-on-tattoos-heres-why-theyre-forgoing-pricey-ink/
July 10th, 2024 at 8:19AM
Questioning the science: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/will-your-tattoo-give-you-cancer-probably-not-but-maybe/
July 10th, 2024 at 8:26AM
Olivia: I hear you. But I’ll take the Lancet over Dr. Jones for the moment.