I remember like 28 years ago, somehow ending up in the front hall during some toddler wandering, and looking up at the (what I now know to be young) man painting the front door, and seeing that he had a big tattoo on his tank top-exposed bicep. It was orange, maybe a little red; it might have been flames, I can’t be sure, but I definitely remember the color orange. And while I don’t remember my first time seeing or hearing about tattoos, that must not have been the first time, because when I saw it, I knew what it was, and remembered that some older person had told me before that only reckless or dangerous people got them. Therefore, I wondered why this man was at our house painting our door.
But as a much older person, I’ve seen hundreds of images on friends, acquaintances, and strangers, and thought they looked so good, not just in that the shapes, colors, and patterns were visually pleasing, but in that sharp way you see a painting or sculpture that has grabbed a little inside part of you that maybe you knew was there and maybe you didn’t. An anxious teacher with a sperm whale in the style of a totem ornament on her leg; a friend of a friend with the Le Petit Prince holding birds on a string on her upper back; a random stranger in an Old Dirty Bastard t-shirt with three or four insects at various levels of enormity ever crawling up and down her calves and thighs. And as I’ve appreciated these pieces of memory, literature, and pure imagination in chemistry with experience, and I’ve come to see it as really fucking beautiful that people of every dimension of shyness and aggression and rebellion and solitude feel carefully around their lived experience, down to the most pointless yet head-buzzingly meaningful detail, for sign to put on their body that is unique either on its face or in how it came to be for that particular person. That people I know are undergoing such a deeply creative experience.
And it is many people – and many more as time passes. In 2003, 15 percent of American adults had at least one tattoo; in 2012 it was 21 percent, and in 2019 it was 30 percent, including half of people born between 1981 and 1996. This has of course coincided with an increase in number of operating tattoo parlors from 500 in 1960 to 10,000 in 1995 to somewhere between 21,000 and 47,000 today, with continued growth projected by those apparently smart and well-respected but impossibly glib and opaque market research firms like IBIS World. My rough draft math says there would need to be 10,000 tattoo artists each inking 4 people per day to meet the growth from 2013-2018 alone.
It’s not just that this is at least one little piece in the potential but as yet unproven flowering of income-earning opportunities for creative people that I yearn for. It’s that now almost 63 million American adults and counting have given over a lot of money and a literal piece of their self to, as research into people’s motivation for getting tattoos suggests, mark their personalities and experiences. Even if you subtract all the dumb, impulsive tattoos, it’s still a large and fast-growing number. Perhaps that tattoos have swollen from an antisocial fringe to a mark of honor and health in one or two generations is evidence that creativity’s raw ingredients are as universal as I hope.
My thought is: if the growth of tattoos equates to growth in desire for people to recognize their personal story and meaning: might they be looking for such recognition elsewhere? Like the TV they watch, or the music they listen to, through consuming content that most people haven’t heard of, but resonates powerfully with their sense of self? Could this growing desire for unique recognition extend beyond traditionally “creative” domains, and could digital networks be helping this along?