Tattoos: Not Just For Sailors
Tattoos have gone from scary taboo to coming of age ritual
Mar 1, 2007
If the thought of tattoos bring up images of toothless sailors, massive bikers named bulldog, porn stars, or even victims of concentration camps, it is time for you to think again. Your fourth-graders teacher, the mother of four, your lawyer or bank teller are just as likely to have tattoos under their everyday clothes as the former.
Contrary to popular belief most people who get a tattoo do so with a lot of thought and it is similar to undergoing a spiritual ritual. I say similar because in western society it has lost these tribal and spiritual connections. Often at a surface level it is done to be cool, to belong, or as an initiation; but I believe this desire is a need to get in touch with our ancient roots, a need we feel to return to a collective memory of a time when our psiritual being was an everyday, physical thing.
Tattooing has passed in and out of fashion in nearly every society. At times outlawed, tattoos have also signified great wealth, beauty, or served as spiritual rite. Most notably in Japanese, Maori, and Hawai’ian cultures. It was used to denote station in life, great spiritual or physical wealth and offset great beauty. It was also used, sometimes simultaneously in these societies, as markers of the slave caste or as punishment. It was also a physical way of expressing the soul, of putting the mark of feeling upon the body.
Today although it has lost this sense of spiritual communion, it is still mostly public statement of private expression. At its basic unconscious level, tattoos are still a means of connecting with the body. People choose this amount of pain, as an equivalent way to celebrate and mark an equally deep moment or feeling in the body's memory.
Some may be unaware of all the reasons why they get that dragon, snake, panther or koi. But over time a tattoo can come to represent more than what it was initially thought. For instance the image of a snake can mean many things. For some it could symbolize power, spiritual growth, a connection to kundalini traditions, or even an event such as a birth in the chinese year of the snake. A snake can symbolize, (as it has in many cultures) a connection to and understanding of energy within, in India and Africa it often signifies this inner wisdom and power. The image of the snake has other connections to the west than the limited view of christianity. Ancient pagan kings of Britain would tattoo snakes around their wrists literally dedicating their lives to the natural cycles of their land.
Subconsciously choosing this initiation rite, is entry into a greater understanding of yourself. Perhaps it is a need for such rites, such markers of time, of life stages, of physical observance that has led to the popularity of tattoos among the under thirties.
There are peoples among where tattooing is still a sacred rite; eastern monks, the Japanese, the polynesians and hawai'ians have still kept the ancient tradition and sacredness of the art.
And art it is.
