Copyright by John T. Reed

Tattoos are ugly. All of them. About the only time they would be an improvement over your skin would be if you were a burn victim or some such.

Young and stupid

Young people have lousy judgment and they lack self-knowledge. The part of the brain that exercises judgment, the Prefrontal Cortex, literally does not fully develop until about age 21. They try on different personalities as if they were trying on clothes looking for one that fit.

Baby Boomer long hair

My Baby Boomer generation was no exception. What did they do to rebel and differentiate themselves from older people? They grew really long hair. I say “they” because I was a cadet at West Point from 1964 to 1968 and an Army officer from 1968 to 1972. We had to get our hair cut short weekly.

Long hair became the fashion around 1967, the year the musical Hair opened. The lyrics of the song Hair by the Cowsills capture the meaning of those long hair styles. Not bathing often and wearing grungy clothes was also part of the shtick. Their main purpose was to gross out their parents’ generation. Mission accomplished.

‘Clean for Gene’

In 1968, Eugene McCarthy ran for president as an anti-war candidate, not unlike Obama 40 years later. Young people wanted to work in McCarthy’s campaign, but the campaign would not let long haired workers be visible to the public for fear of alienating older voters. So young people did what was called “Get clean for Gene.” That is, they got haircuts, bathed, and dressed nicely. They could go from gross out to nice young man in about an hour.

Therein lies the main distinction between the Baby Boomers’ rebellion and that of Generations Y and Z. Today’s tattooed young people cannot get clean “for Gene” or anyone else in an hour or even in a year—if they have a tattoo on a public part of their anatomy. They can never get clean. Dumb move to get permanently tattooed on public skin.

Someone once said that suicide was a permanent solution to a temporary problem. In similar vein, a tattoo is a permanent manifestation of a momentary, perhaps drunken, lapse of judgment.

Thugs

In the past, tattoos were for thugs and drunken sailors. Looking at today’s tattoos, most look like they are still in that vein—like a strand of barbed wire. Young men being insecure about their manhood is common. It is easy to see how a tattoo might help an insecure young man searching for his identity and self-confidence. But that same tattoo will make a thug impression on others for the rest of your life. Chances are, you will not want to look like a thug for long. Tough, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Like I said above, when we are young, we do not know who we are. So we try on different personalities either because we have erroneously concluded that we are an A when we are in fact a G, or because we are experimenting with different personalities. In any event, the sentiment engraved in your skin when you are young is almost certainly not the real you. Furthermore, it is also almost certainly not the mature you. But there it is—permanent—forever telling all who see it what a jerk you were when you were a teenager or college senior or whatever.

It can hurt your career, marriage prospects, ability to convince a judge or jury that you are innocent, etc., etc.

Marks you as old

Here’s one other piece of bad news for the tattooed generation. You know how getting a tattoo signified you were a certified with-it young person? As your generation ages, that same tattoo will certify that you are older than you would like people to know about you. There will certainly come a point where a new generation of young people will regard tattoos as “So 90s” and an old people’s (that’s you) fashion. When that happens, future young people will not go near a tattoo parlor. And your tattoos will mark you as old regardless of how young you were when you got it or how you feel, dress, take care of yourself physically, or whether you get plastic surgery to look younger.

Hair?

What about the hair of the generation of tattooed young men? The idiots shaved it off in high school. When they had hair, they shaved it off. In the not-too-distant future, they will try to grow it out finally, only to discover that it is no longer there. And they will not even have old photos to prove they ever had hair.

Advice

Here is some advice to the young from a Baby Boomer—which I am well aware of is a generation that the young do not look to for advice. If you must get a tattoo, get a temporary one. If you still like it when it fades, get it redone. There is probably no age at which you should make it permanent. Even middle-aged people and seniors sometimes have bouts of stupidity, too, because of trauma like getting fired, serious illness, or divorce.

Advice to the old trying to look young

I also have some advice to the old who get tattooed to try to look young. Spare us. Do the pierced ear instead. When you’re older, that doesn’t look any better than a tattoo, but at least you can take it off and the pierce hole will disappear or at least be hard to see.

I coached five high school sports teams. A number of my colleagues who were my age seemed to try to be one of the teenaged boys by getting pierced, tattooed, wearing a hat backwards, etc. Embarrassing. To thine own self be true.