I have no personal objection to tattoos and/or piercings.

Aversion, repulsion, resistance, but no objection.

However, I am troubled by the ones that are so outlandish, so extensive, so numerous, so intentionally designed to be uncover-able that they succeed in being unavoidably visible.

If you want to tattoo your body, go right ahead.

I have no issue with that.

If you want to pierce your body, ditto.

My issue is when those “expressions of personal freedom” become visible by people serving me food, checking my groceries, checking me in at airport ticket counters.

One of the arguments is “it’s my body I can do what I want”

I agree.

I am just troubled by my having to rely on your wisdom in choosing a competent, infection free, artist.

To borrow language from many Court decisions “We concur in part and we dissent in part”

I concur you can do whatever you want, to whatever part you want.

I dissent that I need to see it.

“Hey, man, get over it, tattoos, piercings, they are part of life, live with it”

(Big fan of not reinventing the wheel, so I will steal another line, this from the movie Butterflies Are Free)

“Hey, man, get over it, tattoos, piercings, they are part of life, live with it”

“So is Diarrhea, but I don’t want to see it…..”

If I encounter someone sporting a tongue, lip, eyelid, or who knows what else piercing, or perhaps visible tattoos extolling the virtue of some dead person, Led Zeppelin, J LO, or the Chicago Black Hawks, all I can think is “Why would anyone want to stick something through their body, or burn it onto their skin, like that? Jeez, I hate accidentally biting my tongue”.

The idea of paying someone, generally sporting limited room on their skin for additional tattoos, and having various metal objects inserted through visible and, I cringe to assume, covered portions of their body, do the same to me, well, it gives me pause. To be diplomatic.

I had a friend that had a lot of tattoos, way before it became fashionable to have a lot of tattoos.

He told me he had a chain tattooed on his wrist which was some sort of sign or symbol to tattoo artists that, according to the Tattooist Bible Code, Creed, or Solemn Oath, prohibited them from doing another tattoo on the bearer of such a mark……..

Really?

My reaction as well….

“Let me get this straight, you got a tattoo so you wouldn’t get any more tattoos?”

Hmmm.

What do you get to stop getting piercings? Sew the lips closed? Blind yourself? Buy a coat of chain-mail? (I know that’s got some piercing fans hitting the Google website.)

Ultimately………..

Your Butterfly, as it ages, becomes a Bassett Hound

And your piercings, rust.

Or you do

Either way its not pretty.