I'm always on the lookout for new fashions among the young, in case I might be missing something important. But, frankly, I haven’t had much success in catching up with the enthusiasms of youth. I’ve missed just about every trend in music and fashion for the past forty years; I’ve missed video games, ipods, smart phones, SnapChat, and just about everything an up-to-date six-year old needs to know.
But now here comes a trend that I just might be able to follow. Our local paper in France published a big article about the newest thing in tattoo art for youngsters. Instead of decorating themselves with the traditional embarrassing love messages, skulls, and spooky abstract designs, they are choosing to flaunt inspiring messages. So each young body becomes a sort of perambulating self-help poster.
Most of the messages quoted in the newspaper article are familiar anodyne phrases attributed rightly or wrongly to Gandhi ("Where there is love there is life.") or the Buddha ("What we think we become.") or Plato ("Life must be lived as play."). Leonardo de Vinci contributes the thought that "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication," which shows that he never tried to use a smart phone. Thucydides advises that: "You must choose between leisure and freedom," which seems not a sentiment likely to appeal to most adolescents.
These aphorisms must be brief, because tattooing hurts, and most young people have a short attention spans. "Be happy while waiting for happiness to come." "Nothing is good until it is shared." Or indeed the popular but ambiguous "Just do it."
Once tattooed on the skin these sentiments become very public. If you change your mind a painful visit to the dermatologist is required. It’s not something that any politician would choose to do. Imagine the embarrassment if, in adolescence, you had yourself tattooed with idealistic messages promoting freedom and equality, and later found yourself in Congress. You could never go to the beach again.
I’ve always rather fancied having a tattoo, but could never decide on the artwork. Now I can do it in words. It’s just a matter of choosing the words. I’m making a list of my favorite quotations before I go to the tattoo shop. So far I have: from Friedrich Nietzsche: "Our truths are the illusions that we have misunderstood." Or, on the brighter side from Mae West, "Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere." Then "Self-knowledge is always bad news" from the novelist John Barth, the famous "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" from George Orwell, and inevitably, from Oscar Wilde, "To love oneself is the beginning is a lifelong romance."
The practical problem is this: where on my body can I display these fragments of wisdom so they will find the maximum audience? In this hot weather,unlike teenagers, I wear clothes most of the time, so there are not many areas of skin available. What’s the point of a hidden tattoo? Perhaps, on my arm or my forehead, I might find space to display just this piece of shrewd advice from Jonathan Swift: "No wise man ever wished to be younger."
Copyright: David Bouchier
