HW 32

To me, tattoos are no big deal. So people want to put a little art on themselves, maybe their whole entire body. Some people find this offensive, as though ruining your body is insulting them in some way. They find this demeaning and demoralizing because tattoos ruins the pureness of the body or something like that. And depending on what tattoos you get, most of the popular ones are rebel tattoos, such as the skull, the thorns, sentences written from other culture, something religious, etc. Most of these tattoos signify what a person believes in or what they find interesting. However, i feel like there is a flaw to a tattoo because they are permanent. It's not the fact that the tattoos stay on your skin for years to come and that they are hard to remove i find hard to comprehend but if a tattoo is suppose to signify who you are, then that means that you better get a tattoo that you will believe in forever to come. In other words, the tattoos to me means that you believe in this one thing, and you will always believe in it, thus never growing up or out of it.
Tattoos in the past were used to symbolize many different things, but the main thing is, for most cultures, a ritual. In most ritual there is some kind of significant drawings of some sort followed by, usually, a group of people acknowledging. Most of these rituals are a rite of passage for boys to become men and they come in many different ways. Most of them are as simple as a "boy" completing a task and then after completing it, are marks with ink from some kind of plant or animal. Some of them are as painful as being drawing on by a knife or some sharp object. My favorite one was when they trapped fire ants in these nets with little tiny wholes and then they place the net all over the "boy"'s body, letting the ant bite them. Because these fire ants are toxic, some "boys" while receiving the tattoo suffer from side effects such as delirium, hallucination, and others. It's funny how much has changed because today anyone can get it if they have enough money and to me is almost meaningless. It's more for reminiscing since it serves no other purpose.
Tattoos to me aren't that popular. I don't notice them as often as i notice the clothes people wear so this becoming a trend is possible but not as popular as other things. Also getting a tattoo does not signify anything. Its like kids nowadays passing the word "love" or "hate" its been overused and has lost all meanings. So getting a tattoo does not signify brave, or heroism, or rebel for that matter, its just art on your body. Or a snapshot art on your body that specifies an event that has taken place in your life. What was once a symbol for only the bravest of people has been reduce to "for sale".