In no particular order… actually in sort of a particular order.

-1-   I don’t have a tattoo.

-2-   Please don’t think Māori or Irezumi.  Different subject.

-3-   Let me get the deranged curmudgeon conclusion out of the way.  I think the reason people get tattoos so cavalierly these days, whether they realize it or not, can be summed up with “I don’t have a future, there is no future”.

-4-   Here is a tale told previously on Domani Dave.  In my former workplace, there was once a sweet and bright and bookish student worker who approached me about her desire to get a tattoo.  She wanted a sun theme, and wondered if I had any suggestions to research a design.  I said maybe English garden gates, or transom windows in the UK, sun-starved as those people are, as I had recalled just such a book of photographs.  She had success with that suggestion, found her sun and got her tattoo.  When she displayed it (on the back of her calf), my reaction was that it looked like a gunshot wound.  I did not tell her this.

-5-   Now for the nuts and bolts, as I understand them.  If you get bright colors in your tattoo, those will fade very quickly.  What remains is blue-black.  Tattoos for the most part these days are applied so inexpertly that other elements will also come into play.  The depth the ink is ‘inserted’ into the surface of the skin is apparently extremely important.  Injected too deep, the ink will drift into the lipids in the skin and begin a process called ‘clouding’.  No matter how crisp your tattoo in the beginning, eventually you have something out-of-focus and black and blue, rather like a bruise.

-6-   Who gets tattoos these days is a never-ending source of astonishment to me.  Longshoremen and bouncers?  Of course.  Petite jeune filles in their sundresses?  Tyler, Justin, or Brandon with their ‘sleeves’?  And when and if this pandemic subsides, what is the future pariah-potential for these trendy youths?

I am willing to be corrected, confronted, or rebuked outright on this topic, though actually, I cannot recall a single bonafide rebuke on Domani Dave.  [sigh…]