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Personal ink not for public consumption
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Published: December 13, 2007
I've been carrying a few secrets on me for several years now, and I'm beginning to wonder why. When I say these secrets are on me, I mean that quite literally. Yes, I am one of those individuals with hidden tattoos.
When I got my first tattoo in 1968, it wasn't the kind of thing you talked about in public. I wasn't in the military, I had never served in the Merchant Marine, and I was not a Maori warrior. And if I had told my mother that I had gone to Lefty's Tattoo Parlor at Rockingham Raceway in New Hampshire, and gotten "inked," I truly believe she would have scrubbed that tattoo right off my right arm.
But I had studied anthropology in college, and I was fascinated by the concept of body art. It's the one constant in every human civilization -- for some reason or another, people everywhere have decorated their skin in a multitude of forms, using different designs and styles, and some fairly horrifying implements to help achieve those designs.
So when my roommate said she had always wanted a tattoo, I agreed to come along for the ride from Boston (where tattooing was still illegal) over the state line into New Hampshire. I was never a fan of needles, but in that pre-AIDS era, there wasn't much concern over infection, and I was excited about my first trip inside one of those dens of sin we were always warned about.
Lefty was a little guy who had a suspiciously high collar and unusually long sleeves. (As suspected, this manner of dress was dictated by ankle-to-neck-to-wrist tattoos, up and down both sides of his body, or so he told us. We did not request a live demonstration.) Lefty lived up to his sobriquet, and did all his drawing with his left hand, not bothering with the stencils that filled the walls of his dingy space. My roommate quickly found a design she liked, and while Lefty began treating her as his newest canvas, I checked out the walls.
Despite the perennial mental image of my disapproving mother, I began to toy with the deliciously dangerous idea of my own tattoo. Something rugged, rough and tough and provocative that proclaimed my masculinity, maturity and grittiness to anyone to whom I chose to show it.
And that was the key, for me. A tattoo was a private affair, a decision between a man and his skin. It wasn't for public consumption, but a kind of personal art gallery that would be open only when I wanted it to be. I chose a spot on my right upper arm that was above the T-shirt line so that I could safely evade my mother's piercing glance.
As I looked over the multitude of designs, all I could remember was what my father's Army buddies had always said: If you were going to wear it for life, you sure better like your tattoo. I finally settled on a Navy model, with a beautiful orange sun rocking lightly on ocean waves, although I omitted the saying that accompanied it.
I had never been "Across the Equator," and it feel fraudulent to pretend I had.
I have since added another few discreet tattoos, not that you would know it looking at me, which is just fine. And that's the problem I have these days. Private tattoos have disappeared, and now it seems that every other teenager or 20-something I see on the street is proudly and publicly displaying a calf, ankle, hand, arm or neck tattoo. And not the little, modest models that I bear, but giant, twisting, swirling blue and red and orange and yellow and green shapes that remind me of the monster plant in Little Shop of Horrors.
And for some reason that I don't totally understand, this offends me. If you want to treat your body as a museum, does it have to stay open 24 hours a day? Can't you enjoy your tattoos by yourself, or do we all have to share in the experience?
We live in era of constantly-diminishing personal privacy, as anyone knows who has encountered the legions of cell-phone spouters, talking out loud (and often loudly) to someone who is physically nowhere near. But must this selfishness extend to body art, also? Get all the tattoos you want, but don't make me part of the potential audience for your art display.
Maybe Lefty, if he's still sketching with his freestyle needle, is pleased by this turn of events. But I can bet you that my mother, who never discovered my hidden tattoos, wouldn't be, and in this case, I agree with her.
■ Dale Pollock, a former dean of the School of Filmmaking at the N.C. School of the Arts, teaches film there now.
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