gullybogan

Dear Reader,

Like you, i’m always very polite about someone’s new tattoo.

I admire it when they first show it to me, and say how nicely the tattoo artiste has captured the haunted, lonely look in the coyote’s eye, and how the full moon the coyote’s baying at is almost perfectly astronomically correct.

I purse my lips sympathetically and nod understandingly while they tell me how much it hurt (if they’re a girl) or how bravely they withstood the excruciating pain (if they’re a boy), and then i look again, politely, when they show it to me the second time, after that little “making of” story, now that i can fully appreciate how much they’ve suffered for their art.

So, on the surface, i’m all, “Yay tattoos!”

But – secretly – it shudders me to my core.

It’s not the pain that worries me; it’s the fact that the thing is there, now, forever.

Or at least for as long as they’re walking around alive.

I’m the guy who leaves the protective plastic on his phone, so it won’t get scratched. I’m the guy who keeps his iPod Shuffle in a tiny little Décor snackbox so that it will remain pristine. I’m the guy who once put a sticker on his car (on the rear side quarter window, mind you) to show the world that he was doing the 40Hour Famine, and then, the weekend after the Famine, spent two and a half hours peeling, rubbing, scraping, and degluing the sticker off again, vowing never ever to repeat that stupid mistake.

I just can’t imagine anything being permanently inked into my skin (and, by empathetic transference, into anyone else’s skin) that would not one day (or instantly) be deeply regretted.

Culture

Mark you (no pun intended), i have nothing against cultural or traditional tattoos. Princess’s people (on her mother’s side) were v.much into tattoos, going back centuries.

The word tattoo comes from Tahiti. Tohu, god of tattooing, painted all the fishes in beautiful colors and patterns. As early as the 18th century European navigators indicated the existence of tattooing in Tahiti.

Tattooing was prohibited at the time of the missionaries, but it didn’t disappear completely. For Polynesians, tattooing is a means of asserting their ma’ohi cultural identity and it favors the use of black color to the detriment of others. Inspired from vegetable or animal geometry, most of the time a tattoo has symbolic meaning. Men and women display the tattoo like jewelry.

Nowadays, you’re more likely to see a hip tattoo

or even a flank tattoo

on a polynesian woman, but if Princess had been born a few generations earlier, she’d have had her legs tattooed, not her hips.

In fact, some lazy Sunday afternoons (and i might be oversharing here), she strips down, puts on these knee-high black stockings that she’s cut the feet out of, and we play Bounty…

OK, that *was* oversharing. Sorry about that. Back to the rant.

…But Betty Boop being propositioned (and by “propositioned” i mean “done doggy”) by Wyle E. Coyote (astronomically correct moon or no astronomically correct moon) is NOT cultural or traditional, OK?

Although you might think it, being as any trip to our local pool (in Boronia) is like a trip to the art gallery, what with all the tatts getting about.

Legalising Tattoos

Here’s the problem. You walk into a tattoo parlour, ask for fifty eight stars on your face, and then you pay for them, have them applied, and go home, your face somewhat more like a constellation than it was when you walked in.

There’s no cooling off period. No intervention by someone with judgement. You just walk in, and bang.

In My Humble Opinion, there should be a cooling off period. There should be some sort of paperwork involving the signatures of two or more grown-ups.

The process should be regulated.

You should walk in, say, “i want that one of the coyote fucking the fat faced girl up the date, right here, on my neck,” and then you should be given some paperwork to take away and get completed, and then, and only then, three weeks later, when you come back after the mandatory cooling off period, they put the ugly thing on your neck for you.

If you still want it.

Which i’m thinking you won’t, once the Jagermeister and speed cocktail has cleared from your system.

And if you *do* still want it, go right ahead and get it done.

Science, Anyone?

Even better: someone in a lab coat needs to invent a proper temporary tattoo process, where the ink stays on your arm bright and vivid for two or three years, and then, magically, fades over a week or so, leaving no trace.

That way, skin art could become fashion-compatible, rather than being a lifelong commitment thing.

That is: a tattoo could be like a Swatch™.

I could live with a busty hula girl tattoo on my upper arm, if i knew for a fact that it would disappear after three years.

Penetrating The Market

Things like tattoo and piercing parlours have to get out of the back alleys and railway station carparks now, and start being proper; start opening up in shopping centres, next to the phone shops.

And while i’ve solved the problem for tattoos, someone else will have to come up with a solution for piercings. I’m out of ideas.

You could argue that, if left empty and alone, a piercing will just close up, leaving only a tiny dimple to show they were ever there. And sure, that’s true; i’ve often had to repierce Princess’s lobes after she’s gone a few weeks without metal in her holes.

But there still needs to be some regulation. For the piercer’s sake as much as for the piercee’s.

Last week, the Bogan Times ran a story about this piercing artiste who got in trouble with the law for piercing these girls who said they were nineteen.

They were sixteen and thirteen.

They each wanted a clitoral piercing, so the guy had to (and i understand this is standard procedure in this particular service) stimulate the girls’ clitorises to make them stand up, so that he could pierce them.

For which he was charged with penetration of a minor.

Get it? Penetration?

He stuck a needle through their clit? Get it?

Good.

If you’ve read this whole rant, you deserve a reward. So, click below for a voucher to have any form of genital piercing you wish, redeemable in any laneway near Bayswater Station. Ask for a guy named “Harley”.

HIS

HERS

Yours,
Gullybogan