The People Inside the Tattoos
Welcome to my Substack, and some scattered musings about why body art is no longer just for sailors and outsiders.
Hi!
I’m A. R. Yngve. From Sweden. (Commence the “hurdy gurdy murdy” jokes. Hey, it’s OK - I love The Muppets too.)
I wonder, perhaps too much, about things. Such as: How come I never got a tattoo? And why did so many other ordinary people get tattoos in the past few decades?
I want to understand other people, just out of curiosity. For most of my life, I’ve felt like I was merely observing humanity from outside… as if I were an alien visitor or anthropologist. I can understand what I have in common with everyone else, and that’s fine - but then people do things I need to actively figure out.
Such as tattoos - body art and writing with permanent ink.
There was a time when mainly sailors and society’s “outsiders” had tattoos. (Feels like ages ago, but it wasn’t.) If body art is now totally mainstream, does that mean there are no outsiders anymore? If everyone’s an outsider, then nobody is…? Can you have a culture without an “outside”…?
Maybe the meaning of tattoos changed. Or perhaps they just gained more meanings and functions.
Here I would like to draw inspiration from the late, great, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan. (He was the inspiration for “Brian O’Blivion” in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome.) McLuhan wrote much about how media shaped human perception and identity. He called his examinations of media and society “probes.”
Probe: Why did sailors get tattoos? Consider tattoos as a form of media, because… well, they are.
“Classical” sailor’s tattoo. (CC Wikipedia image source: Ricardo Almeida)
The classical sailor tattoos carried valid data about the wearer’s identity: Name of the ship, relatives, family, home port, religious affiliations, etc.
If you worked on a ship at sea for months, even years on end, you could get in trouble or get sick, or die… and it might be difficult to identify you abroad, whether dead or alive. The sailor’s tattoos could help identify a person (or a corpse), and that mattered a great deal for practical and legal reasons.
Note how tattoos have not evolved into impersonal “bar codes” with just rows of data; that would be dehumanizing (and they were used precisely that way in the Holocaust). The personal information on a tattoo is meant also for the wearer to reinforce one’s own sense of identity; a mere serial number can’t and won’t do that.
Imagine you’re away from home for 18 months. You’re mainly surrounded by a featureless sea, very few landmarks, people talking in foreign languages, no word from home… you could easily start forgetting who you are and where you came from.
The tattoos served as a reminder: These are my relatives. This is my sweetheart waiting for me back home, this is my religion, this who and what I am… and this is my soccer team.
The tragic protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s fantastic movie Memento is the extreme example: His entire identity is stored in his tattoos. There’s nothing else. He’s totally lost.
A tattooed Yakuza is an outcast, a gangster - for that person, the tattoo means not personal, but tribal identity. Not “This is who I am” but “This is my tribe, where I now belong.” The Yakuza would be socially lost at sea, a sailor without a home port, without that signifying tattoo.
Hypothesis: Modern middle-class people get tattoos because we’re out at sea every day, far from home; our sense of location and self are “adrift.” I mean not a physical ocean, but the endless data sea that is the Internet.
It may not be coincidence that tattoos went mainstream roughly at the same time as the World Wide Web did. Now the tattoos are there to assert personal identity markers even if you don’t physically travel, but still feel as if you’ve been away from home for months.
(Someone ought to find out whether the very first Internet users, the people working at CERN, got tattooed within the first few years of using it. I don’t know, but it would be interesting.)
Do you sometimes feel… adrift? Like you’re trying to recall the last time you were talking to someone who really knew you… like you’re missing the feeling of being “anchored” to a specific physical place, specific individuals?
What’s your “home port”? Who are all these countless, invisible strangers you communicate with every day? (That they all seem to address you as if you’re up close and personal just adds to the confusion.)
Do you sometimes feel like you’re drowning in the Internet? Scrolling down, down, down… sinking into the depths of Twitter. Better get up for some fresh air. Check that tattoo and remember who you are.
Which brings me back to why I never got a tattoo, and never will. I think it’s because I have a strong sense of individual self. My sense of personal identity is stronger than any “tribal" affiliation, if I have any at all. (This isn’t an attempt to brag, mind you - there’s absolutely nothing intrinsically “superior” about being this way. A “flexible” sense of identity can certainly be a social asset.)
(And why would I need tattoos to “express myself,” when I can write? I mean, I’d never tattoo a novel, or a whole bunch of novels, onto my skin. The canvas is too small!)
My very idea of identity is internal, meaning it’s literally and metaphorically inside my brain… but I wonder whether that may no longer be the social norm, and perhaps right there is another reason why tattoos went mainstream.
Second hypothesis: The “internal self” is going the way of the dodo. People now both give away and act out so much of their personal thoughts and lives on social media, that the distinction between mental “inside” and “outside” is blurring.
Imagine when this trend goes a step further. If you opened a digital funnel directly attached to your brain, so that any random, unfiltered thoughts would instantly be posted on social media, do you think you could still know for sure what was “the real you”?
I have a hunch you wouldn’t.
Most likely, your very innermost self would spontaneously edit itself to be “suitable” for mass consumption. Surely that would drive you mad: “Must… not… think… anything… that… might… upset... Jack… Dorsey…”
(The exception would be a narcissistic psychopath utterly lacking in shame or consideration for others, who’d gladly let his worst authentic self spill out over the world… but when was that ever a problem on social media.)
I wonder whether, thanks to the Internet, we are slowly becoming humans without a sense of our true identities being “locked” inside the mind. This may have consequences both good and bad… but if you have no internal life, the tattoos are a basic part of an identity that’s all “outside.” There’s no point in having a tattoo written inside the body. (Though of course some hipster poseur might do that anyway.)
I don’t think I’d want to be a person without an “inside” identity. That tattooed protagonist in Memento is like a rudderless ship, being buffeted and blown by outside forces, easily manipulated into doing horrible things. And the more aggressively he insists on his very few, tattooed identity markers - what he’s “about”, where he’s “from” - the more obvious it becomes that he’s from nowhere and going nowhere.
Can you have a culture without an “outside”? Perhaps.
Can you have a person without an inside?
I think we’ll soon find out, once that Neuralink project is realized.
This was my very first Substack post. If you’d like to read more of my musings about identity, and the many ways one might lose it, check out my short fiction collection THE FLATTERED PLANET And Other Stories.