The University is Closed for Open Day by Stephen Knight

Author:Stephen Knight [Knight, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Essays
ISBN: 9780522874679
Google: iH5pxQEACAAJ
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2019-11-05T02:44:58+00:00

Will the Marks Last?

Among the wealth of internet tattoo-ology there is a contradictory presence—firms advertising their skill and confidence in removing just those marks that so many screens display and, indeed, advertise. Since 1967 it has been possible, though at first it was considerably painful, to have tattoos removed by laser, but there will be a resultant scar, originally quite large. Sometimes people cover it with another less-disturbing design, but other forms of treatment are available in the massive range of ointments and unguents that can change the surface of the human skin.

Not much in the tattoo literature discusses removal. The quite serious studies referenced here avoid this topic, being usually written by scholars who are themselves tattooed, men and women both, and have some form of commitment to what they recurrently name, but never really define, as ‘the tattoo community’—that term appears to have no meaning beyond those people who for very varied and in many cases mysterious reasons decide to succumb to the inked needle. When the topic of removal is raised, it is to suggest this is the outcome of embarrassment or a change of mind—a failed love affair, a broken friendship. But people quite frequently come to regret their tattoos, especially easily visible ones, or they may simply discover that the surviving distaste for them is sociopolitically bothersome, as when they wish to proceed in some career where—like the police, banking, and perhaps surprisingly the army—tattoos on the face, neck or hands are basically not permitted.

Tattoo extirpation has been estimated as involving 10–15 per cent of tattoo wearers. So not more than 3 per cent, or 5 per cent at most, of the current Anglophone populations are likely to become less prominent in the tattoo-wearing domain. Although that percentage might grow as more and more young people acquire tattoos, and some at least regret the fact, they are not likely to be a real force in the diminishing of the present presence of the self-decorating habit. More interesting is to speculate on whether there will be a move away from this mode of re-situating the personal identity, to be seen both from inside the person and by those inspecting it.

There have over time been considerable changes in the sociocultural status and personal possession of tattoos, from the early high-ranking and highly visible uses across the world from Pictland to Native America and on across the Pacific islands to China and Japan. But those changes arose through variations in the status and attitudes of the minorities that used tattoos—like late Roman prisoners under Constantine’s banning order, or the trendy rich who abandoned tattooing when it became much cheaper and much less distinctive by the early twentieth century. The practice has now extended far beyond such subcommunities who, through their socionumerical limitations, were as tattooees vulnerable to change. There seems as a result little likelihood, in the time of electronic communication and especially the ramping up of personalised culture and self-assertion that has been made so vigorous in

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