Mutilating Your Body

I am a heavily tattooed individual. And I say "individual" because that's what I am. There is a difficulty in feeling like an individual when you are heavily tattooed. All over our bodies, from the face down, people are getting a lot of tattoo's. If you were around the punk and hardcore scene only ten years ago, when you saw someone with many tattoo's it was an amazing thing to see. You understood that this person had made a serious decision about their lives and their possible futures. Ones attitude is so important when one embarks on a life of permanent ink. Some go into it ignorantly, without much thought. Many attempt at taking a shot at being "special" and "interesting," but those people you can spot a mile away as being fake and insincere in their attempt.
When you look in the mirror what do you see? Tattooing has become "art" and "fashion", all subjective and extremely misguided labels for the heavily tattooed person. Tattooing has lost some of the power it once held within Western culture. The issue is two-fold. One positive and the other negative. First the positive change, that being heavily tattooed does not automatically make you a criminal. This is good. Believe me. Older generations still think in this light, at least most of them, older generation being 50 years old and over. Not a generalization I'm sure. Different times equal different measures. Yet what the consensus is, which most shops and the current tattoo cultural climate will have one believe, that tattooing is somehow mainstream. Which leads me to the second issue, the negative issue, that tattooing is swiftly becoming a mainstream commodity.
The body is generally regarded as a temple. It is this temple in which many cultures and pockets of the planet hold to be sacred and holy. When one tattoo's oneself, heavily, one is definitely desecrating this temple. Western culture, especially in North America, relies on the media and the hype of celebrity in order to legitimate decisions made by the few for the many. Tattooing is one of these subjects. We are being sold the illusion that tattooing is cool, rad, and subversive. It is not. It is not, because many decisions seem to be made because your friends or your scene decides for you. When it comes to your body, your decision to tattoo yourself should always be yours and no one else's. You are damaging your body with ink and pain. Pain being the decisive factor. If anybody reading this has even been truly tattooed they will know the meaning of the most honest pain you can ever do to yourself.
You are doing it to yourself. You have made a conscious decision to hurt yourself. You are paying someone a lot of money to make you squirm, bleed, and feel like dying. This is most definitely "temple" desecration. You are not doing yourself any favours. You are not a part of the mainstream, you are not cool and you are not an individual when you tattoo yourself heavily. Yet people are fascinated by you when you walk into a room, when you take off your shirt, when you are aware of the awareness. It fills you with a kind of surface independence, a contradiction of what it actually does represent. The same independence as if you would wear a winter jacket in 80 degree weather. You have made a decision to do something against the grain, against logical sensibility yet you do it anyway, but not always for the right reasons. Independence means freedom and you do not allow yourself to be truly free when you tattoo yourself. You are actually placing yourself in a very precarious position, one where many of your choices have already been made for you, even if your ink isn't visible, it's visible.
Perhaps this is more mental than physical. If you go into tattooing knowing many of the things that I have brought to your attention then maybe, just maybe, you can somehow be free of the illusions which many will have you believe tattooing really is? If one does for oneself, and does it for their own well being, then they can truly set themselves free from what their ink represents. Separation from their body, from their mind, from their ink. Maybe that is the truest sense of freedom one can attain.