In the middle of the week, a dreaded message from my youngest offspring, currently 19, popped up on my WhatsApp. Attached were pictures of him and his siblings, presenting their arms, all newly tattooed. The message read, “ur children have all gotten their first tattoos.”
While this news wasn’t wholly unexpected, as the youngest had expressed intentions of getting tattoos with his brother and sister, it still left me perturbed. They emphasized frequently about stepping into adulthood and hence not requiring my approval or agreement. Despite my tongue-in-cheek response to their shared pictures, tagging the parents as scapegoats, they had gone ahead.
As a gesture of parental concern, I gently reprimanded their decision to scar their bodies, due to its customary association with wrongdoers and football players. Their mother, on her part, advised caution. Yet their decision prevailed.
A small solace was that their tattoos were minimalist, unobtrusive, and devoid of any controversial or political implications. I could appreciate the fact that they underwent this process together, reinforcing their bond. In usual circumstances, my generation believed in the phrase “A family that prays together, stays together.” It appears the new-age mantra is, “Siblings that get tattooed, stay united.”
Even as I was coming to terms with being the parent of a family of tattoo-bearers, an article in the latest issue of the Times Literary Supplement came as an unexpected source of comfort. A man, amongst 2,094 other participants, had offered his body as the canvas for a short story titled ‘Skin,’ by the artist Shelley Jackson. The tale is inscribed only on the bodies of the volunteers, one word at a time.
The fact that renowned figures of history like George Orwell wore tattoos was particularly reassuring to my cultural sensitivities. Orwell acquired his tattoo during his term as a law enforcer in colonial Burma. The motive behind this act remains disputed, with certain accounts citing local superstitious beliefs of preventing snake bites as the reason. On the contrary, a recent Oxford literature thesis suggests that he got the tattoo as a conscious mental effort to alleviate regret related to being part of the colonial injustice, by symbolically modifying his ‘skin ego’.
As I researched more about historical figures with tattoos, I came across important names including Winston Churchill, who had an anchor tattooed on his forearm, Franklin D Roosevelt, who had his family crest inked on his chest, and Thomas Edison, who had five dots on his arm. Interestingly, Edison used his own invention, the electric pen for his tattoo and one could only guess that he was testing the pen with a vision to patent the invention, which, however, he did not.
Surprisingly, it was an Irish-American of the first generation, Samuel O’Reilly (1854-1909), who took Edison’s invention a step further by developing the original electric tattoo machine in 1891.
O’Reilly’s life story could serve as both, a word of caution and a source of inspiration to parents worried about their children making poor tattoo choices. O’Reilly’s criminal past involved burglaries, resulting in prison sentences. He failed as a burglar, once when he was a teenager, for robbing a grocery store with friends, and a second time, interestingly with his parents, that landed him five more years in prison.
Nevertheless, in the 1880s, O’Reilly bounced back, establishing himself as a noted tattoo artist in New York. Noticing the potential of a technology that Edison failed to seize, O’Reilly made a lasting impression on history, as well as on numerous clients.
His clientele was diverse, featuring regular sailors requesting anchor tattoos, Irish-Americans wanting flags interwoven with the slogan “Erin go Bragh”, and a growing number of adventurous members from the higher rungs of society.
Ward McAllister, a New York-based snooty social critic, decried the rising popularity of tattoos, condemning it as “the most vulgar and barbarous habit the eccentric mind ever invented”. However, this contentious debate continues to reverberate in contemporary times.
My son’s WhatsApp message summoned a memory of an old television show where, if I remember correctly, Billy Connolly received his inaugural tattoo in his later years. Following the procedure, he echoed the tattoo artist saying, “One more of us, one less of them”. The edgy implications traditionally attached to tattoos have significantly faded since those times. Predicting based on the current tendencies, tattooing could soon be a commonplace rather than an oddity. Meanwhile, I am somewhat reminded of a phrase Nigella Lawson once said in a dialogue with me.
At that point in time, we shared one commonality, that is, both of us were parents to two children. However, that was all the children she was to have, as her first husband was battling a life-threatening illness, a fact she deeply regretted. “I’ve always considered parents ought to be outnumbered by their children,” she had mentioned.
As it turned out, shortly after our conversation, my wife and I found ourselves outnumbered by our own offspring. Remarkably, that was almost two decades ago. Yet, until quite recently, the thought never crossed our minds that we could also be outnumbered in the context that was implied by Billy Connolly’s tattoo artist. Unexpectedly, this week with the swift action of a tattoo machine, the tally became two of us versus three of them.