HW #32 Tattoos

I think tattoos are a symbol of recognition. If a person is recognized through a crowd with something that is on his/her body, s/he would look different than others. We all want to be different than others so we tried not to wear the same clothing or put something more to get more attention than others. However, people want to get something such as a tattoo, like Sarah's friend because of her mother, to show how much she love her mother, which meaningful and significance in her life. We might interpret it as getting spotlight if the person wants to reveal what was imprinted on his/her skin. We want to be recognized, to be a different person by adding art on our bodies but sometimes a tattoo also brings forth a history that others don't know.

Tattoos are to show the roles that we are playing in the society. One may think it is cool to get a tattoo and show it to people, but it places them in a certain category. Like the Atayal tribe in Taiwan, who uses facial tattoos to demonstrate how "an adult man can protect his homeland, and that an adult woman is qualified to weave cloth and perform housekeeping" (Wiki Tattoo). I think in the past, tattoos are a symbolic form of the knowledge a person has and/or the (rite of) passages that people went through. Tattoos are there to show the confidence, strength, knowledge a person has and I think that is cool. We want to show off what we have went through and if we want to use tattoos to show it, then it is to let the world know what kind of power we have gained. Similar to how Mr. John Fanning's tattoos, where it shows the "rites of passages" and important experiences he had went through. He got the tattoos that will be on his two arms forever because it reveals meaning inside of him.

Like the Holocaust, where the Jewish have to be tattoo with identification, people see this history as sad and horrible but to those who have survived, that tattoo carries on a history and the strength the survivors had lived through. Then to a lot of us, we want to know what the history is specifically so we asked them to show it off to us, feeding us information. But when we look at it, it is a different kind of show off because that identification is a tattoo category that gives off significance. I think that when things such as tattoos are being forced onto our bodies, people would feel sympathy towards us and not think how badly we want to be cool. If it is not forced, then people would think differently of us because tattoos are imprinted in our bodies forever, like a scar (unless we do plastic surgery).

There are a lot of categories of tattooing because the images that are needled into the bodies have different meaning. Unlike the Holocaust case of tattooing, the tattoos that I see today are merely for the coolness we find in them but also to show ourselves who we are. People might think that having tattoos are seeking for attention but I think tattoos reassure people because they know that they have their bodies in control the way they wanted them to. Mr. Fanning said how having these tattoos on his arms show that this is his body and he can put what he wants to put. The tattoos, he said, gave him an "armor" to protect himself and to tell others that he can protect himself well that you do not need to tell him what to do (is how I saw it). It gives a sense of self respect and peer respect when the peers can acknowledge the fact that ourselves can be "adult". It shows the power that having this tattoo is also what makes who we are. Similar to the inner and outer representation, the art of the tattoo reveals who we are and the pain that we went through to get that tattoo.

For me, I imagined that it is painful to get even a small tattoo. I think the larger the tattoo is, the more power people want to have. But to other people, it makes them think how much power those people with the tattoo already have so it makes sense how others find those people scary. But the scarier they look; it builds up the power that others had given to them, creating a “cool” image for themselves. I think cool is the same as tattoo. There are so many variations and so many choices but both of them ask us whether we want it or not.