Survey: 24 Percent Between 18-50 Tattooed

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A generation or two ago, Yu's tattoos _ to say nothing of his pierced nose _ probably would have placed him in a select company of soldiers, sailors, bikers and carnival workers. But no longer: The American University employee is among about 36 percent of Americans age 18 to 29 with at least one tattoo, according to a survey.

The study, scheduled to appear Monday on the Web site of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, provides perhaps the most in-depth look at tattoos since their popularity exploded in the early 1990s.

The results suggest that 24 percent of Americans between 18 and 50 are tattooed; that's almost one in four. Two surveys from 2003 suggested just 15 percent to 16 percent of U.S. adults had a tattoo.

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You can count me as part of that 24 percent, and damned if I can easily articulate a reason why I joined the ranks. I pondered the deed for nearly five years before I finally took the plunge. I mean, it was a permanent aesthetic alteration of my body, so I wanted to make sure that what I was going to get would be something I could live with. But I also wanted to make it a reflection of myself, which is difficult because that requires that I have a good understanding of myself, which I'm still not sure I have. At first, I thought I wanted something really radical, in the political sense, and was musing about a Vladimir Lenin tattoo (like his head here), but my old buddy Vince, as much of a communist, at that point, as anyone I've ever really known, strongly advised against it, reminding me how much blood the revolutionary had on his hands. This got me thinking that I'd better stay away from too terribly explicit of a message--there's no telling how I'd feel about whatever statement I was making then twenty years down the road. So I decided that something elemental, something universal but vague, would fit the bill. I was leaning toward some kind of a moon image because I love staying up all night, but when I finally made it to the tattoo parlor, on my birthday, January 3rd, back in 2000, I saw a dark sun that really called out to me. And, bam, after about a half hour of needling pain, I was tattooed.

Of course, none of this explains why I decided to get a tattoo in the first place. I'm still not sure about that; I really only know that I wanted one. Maybe it was because tattoos seemed to be part of the zeitgeist for young people in the 90s, and, even though I finally took the plunge three days after the decade had ended, I wanted to feel like I was a part of all that. I don't know. It's probably just because I think tattoos are cool, nothing intellectual or artsy about my decision process. I just wanted to be cool.

Six years later, I still love my tattoo, but I'm afraid it didn't do much to make me cool. Actually, I don't know what, if anything, will be able to pull off that Fonzie-feat for me, but my skin-art is kinda neat, don't you think?



After a while, I noticed that my "black hole sun" tattoo is reminiscent of the symbol of the house of El, Superman's family on Krypton, as depicted in the comics during the 60s and 70s. Kal-El's father, Jor-El, wore it on his chest in the days before Krypton exploded. Obviously, I love the Man of Tomorrow dearly, and always have, so maybe I made the right choice.

Nowdays I'm wondering if one tattoo is enough. What should I get if I do it again? I wonder...

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