A recent article in the Financial Times profiled a variety of professionals, including doctors, lawyers, architects, and pharmaceutical executives who openly display tattoos in the workplace. One tattoo artist told FT that 90 percent of her clients are corporate professionals. Ironically, Buc-ee’s, increasingly a nationally recognized brand spreading beyond Texas, just instituted a nationwide policy prohibiting employees from displaying visible tattoos.
Whether you define the cultural phenomenon of tattoos as an act of rebellion or individual expression, its ascendancy is dramatic and ubiquitous. In a single generation, the number of American adults with at least one tattoo has doubled, from about 16 percent in 2003 to 32 percent in 2023. Almost half of Americans between the ages of 30 and 49 have a tattoo. That fact suggests that far from being subversive or individualistic, the tattoo has actually become banal and conformist, yet another trend like podcasts and “influencers” that, once interesting for being novel and exotic, induces sighs, yawns, and even eye-rolls.
What Tattoos Have to Say About Our Culture
There has been plenty of fascinating conservative commentary as tattoos have become increasingly popular in the United States. First Things editor and former academic Mark Bauerlein more than a decade ago provocatively argued that tattoos demand recognition, communicating, “Look at me,” in a manner that speaks to a certain type of narcissism and exhibitionism. They also, says Bauerlein, underscore the modern conceit that the body is raw material for autonomous individuals to redesign as they see fit, representing a movement from “the body as physique to the body as text.”
Essayist Joseph Epstein labels tattoos as a violation of good taste and proper decorum, in line with (legitimate) complaints about people wearing pajamas in public, including to school or work. Theologian and philosopher Carl Trueman categorizes tattoos as one of many symbols of purportedly nonconformist identity that are so commonplace they now function as safe, conventional markers of rebellion. This is akin to Rage Against the Machine — who, despite their rebellious, anti-corporate screeds, were thoroughly commercialized — releasing their records through billion-dollar business Sony Music Entertainment.
Tattoos as a Dreamy-Eyed Desire to Be a Celebrity
Yet one of my favorite takes on tattoos is that offered by essayist Theodore Dalrymple in his recent book Agatha Christie and the Metaphysics of Murder, in which he connects ink to the contemporary obsession with celebrity. “In modern mass society, people need more than ever to individuate themselves,” he writes. He continues:
This need becomes all the more imperative in a culture of celebrity. … To have, from an early age, one’s mind filled with images of famous people — the merit that gives rise to their fame is unimportant — and then to be nobody oneself, to have no public recognition, to be one of an anonymous mass, with no likelihood of becoming anything else, is a terrible blow or wound to the ego.
In other words, in a society obsessed with the idea of celebrity — think of the stadium fan cam, allowing sports spectators to have their five seconds of “fame” — tattoos enable the everyman to be somebody. What is both scary (and asinine) is how deeply we have imbibed this narrative. “To be is to be perceived; not to be perceived is not to be,” writes Dalrymple.
Yet, as Dalrymple rightly argues, this is a quixotic effort. “To try to individuate oneself, and mark oneself out from others, by doing what thousands, or millions, of others do, is doomed to futility.” Though tattooing may seem to represent a form of individuation, given we can all have our own unique ink, “this fades somewhat as the practice spreads so as to become statistically normal.” Once thought to be transgressive, tattoos increasingly amount to something no different than the suits and ties we have so desperately sought to repudiate.
Perhaps one of the most risible aspects of our contemporary tattoo phenomena is its popularity among middle-class women. “A higher proportion of adult women than men are now tattooed,” notes Dalrymple. If you are a white-collar female, especially with a husband and children, I’m sorry, but you are the exact antithesis of rebellion and iconoclasm. You are as “normal” and conventional as they come. That ink flower on your ankle is about as transgressive an expression of your individuality as a minivan covered with bumper stickers about your kids.
Instead of a Tattoo, Get a Prayer Life
The difficult news we all need to hear is that tattoos, like so many other cultural trends, cannot give us what we want — namely, a feeling that we are unique individuals charting our own course, worthy of admiration and love. In an understandable attempt at self-expression, covering ourselves with ink ironically has made us conformist to a cultural phenomenon that, in time, may very well be viewed as absurd and embarrassing, like fake tans or frosted tips. And, as Federalist editor Mark Hemingway reminds us, what once looked sleek and cool may, in time, provoke confusion or even nausea, if not cause us health problems.
Our bodies are a gift from God, a remarkable evolutionary achievement, or both. Either way, to mark them up with ink in ways that amount to little more than individualistic expression, similar to a playful T-shirt, is an insult to their natural beauty and their inherent giftedness as an expression of the imago Dei. You can change your hairstyle, clothing, or earrings in response to the fickle feelings of modern culture. Tattoos are permanent, unless you’re willing to drop some serious money.
Perhaps more poignantly, tattoos are about as annoying and predictable as the latest person who has decided to start a podcast or chart a career as an influencer featuring cliché videos of their time in the gym or eating a high-protein bowl or “girl dinner.” Instead of getting a butterfly, flower, or inspirational phrase inked on your body — all of which follow a boring, predictable cultural script — consider doing something truly revolutionary. Be virtuous. Be prayerful. And act in such a way that you don’t care if anyone is paying attention to you. Now that’s rebellion.
