Body art has gone bolder, and celebrities are leading the pack, if you can call it that. No softie when it comes to her fashion style and songs, British pop singer Cheryl Cole, featured recently in the theguardian.com, couldn’t have cared less about the snooty public reactions to her extravagant bottom line: her entire backside abloom with a tattoo of vibrant scarlet roses.
“It used to be that women got smaller, dainty tattoos and now they go for bolder and bigger images […] a desire to adorn themselves. Much like jewelry and clothes,” said Dutch tattoo artist Angelique Houtkamp. Indeed, while some conservative sectors declare their befuddlement over tattoos as a kind of desecration of the flesh, the more intrepid and audacious of the human lot view artful body scarring as a profound means to reclaim their body as their own, an expression of their individuality through art with the body as their canvas.
You couldn’t be more wrong to think that body tattoos are a modern invention admired only by the young and the hip. Egyptologists scarcely mentioned the presence of body markings on mummies, allegedly due to their prevailing social attitudes on tattoos. In Pacific cultures, tattooing hews more closely to the idea of rank and spirituality.
Take the Polynesian people, for example, who believe that a person’s Mana, or life force, can be displayed through his or her tattoo. In Samoa, tattoos are also used to depict the rank and title of tribe leaders, and tattooing ceremonies are usually elaborate affairs.
There’s a downside to this art, however. Personal tastes and preferences, as with life attitudes, evolve over time; what was once meaningful no longer is. What to do with the “Johnny Forever” on your inner thigh? Just consider yourself fortunate that laser technology is advancing, and tattoo removal in Albuquerque, for instance, makes tattoo removal far safer and relatively painless.
It is indeed far easier to be you than to be someone else, but a word of caution to the fickle: before you scar yourself permanently to inscribe an idea or a pledge, live with it first and make itself truly at home in you. But if, one day, you get a pang of tattoo regret, you’ll be lucky to get safe treatment like laser tattoo removal from Albuquerque cosmetic centers or a medical spa, such as Belleza Med Spa.
(Article Excerpt and Image from Cheryl Cole’s latest body art: the bottom line, The Guardian, August 28, 2013)
Recent Comments