Well I’m really going there.

I picked a big, big fight against a major majority, a giant so to speak. But you must have known this was coming, we can all see that here’s a huge African Bull Elephant in plain sight but few want t at least talk about it.

I decided to aver on something that, of all the controversial things to say, is the most likely to de-popularize me due to the fact that most people are on the other side of the point, however I ask you to hear and even dispute the point and adhere to the golden rule–don’t shoot the messenger.

It’s like the moment on the Jerry Springer Show where everybody shouts ‘booooo’!

Make no mistake this world has suddenly ‘become’ the Jerry Springer Show, an open asylum, as I like to call it, compliments of Hollywood for vision and Sony for sound as they endorse your trending movements in reality. 

Let me first say, modern tattoos will soon be looked at, as a symbol of a superficial generation, held together by an inorganic glue called  ‘ego’.

One might look back and see the preserved practices of ancient tribes, engaging in a similar practice to find justification but ‘they’re not that similar’.

In the unadulterated tribe, every permanent stain on the sacred epidermis meant something; it bore significant meaning to their next kinfolk; each mark made a single point known by all. It may have been that a stripe symbolised a heroic act, a circle could mean that you’ve come of age or a triangle meant that you had become a parent (In fact, I think it was exactly that).

What we see today, collectively, bears a striking resemblance to a garbage truck holding everybody else’s random rubbish, reflecting the various households’ purchasing habits. But not even, since in garbage disposal there’s a pattern, an order that’s recognised on site. There’s compost, plastic and glass and then card, all coordinated and known by the community. There’s a colour-coded language that is understood by both the waste producer and waste disposer. Generally we know green means to recycle and so on.

These tattoos are all over the place, all bearing significance to each individual as though their own is more significant than another’s, or so they try to convince themselves.

From a picture of a baby on a woman’s arm, to a penis on a man’s neck, none more important than another ‘to’ the other.

I’m of the belief that, something authentic needs little explanation, hence a picture is worth a thousand words, but the writer may use one word to describe a thousand pictures: ‘belong’.

Could it be that the voice that a suppressed society has lost, could attempt to trickle out through these detrimental hieroglyphs or is it subliminal, suggested self-branding? We must remember the subtle satirical language of existence, despite the literal numbness instilled into western culture, things mean things. Whether its a colour , a number or an image, these are all Sigils–Latin sigillum, pl. sigilla, meaning “seal”–and all of these forms of light attract but what? It could also be that they no longer see words like the Dandies, they just say em. They can’t extract the words, ‘draw in’ from the words ‘drawing’. I’m sure they don’t even see the word ‘art’ or ‘act’ in ‘attract’ and so what’s being drawn into their experience goes over their heads just like chemical trails in the sky.

So I no longer question, why you have a butterfly on your forehead, a dragon on your back, a skull on your butt cheek or a teardrop under your eye, I just conclude: Jerry Springer has gone global.

‘It’s a picture of my mum and right here, these numbers, intertwined in her hair, are her date of birth and here’s the day that she died from Covid; the one on my other shoulder is a ball of Covid with a hand grip squeezing it to death and…’ shut up!

Franco is a very flamboyant homosexual man. One summer while he’s dressing the window for the Charity shop chain he works for, you can see part of the drawing of the top of a phallic shaft, poking out from the neck of his Armani t-shirt. Well in truth it could really have been any erect object, but the drops of liquid ejecting from the top almost touching his jaw bone make it very clear that it’s a very tacky sexual innuendo, immediately banning him from children’s birthday parties around the world and making him look like a freak at certain swimming pools.

I wonder what would go through an undertaker’s mind preparing a lifeless body of a nonagenarian with similar tattoos?

For these beautifully ornate stains, they have every reason in the world but I think I’ve heard enough of the ‘deep’ reasoning.

At some point, all of us are guilty of saying ‘look at me’, in our various ways, but we eventually grow out of these appeals to impress others. We can even grow out of our Dr Marten’s and doing the robot without a memory, like flares and partings in our eyebrows but there are few things sadder than, seeing an aged person’s diminished tattoos. It almost extravenously drains away the idea of wisdom.

As each person’s expectation of a daily sunrise, firmly becomes the inevitable grip of our yearly cycle, the time program also aids us in predicting our departure. We are thrown into a reality that, even though we can act as though it won’t happen, it makes no difference to the certainty of decline that lives in our minds. We witness the loosening of the epidermis and it’s accompanying ink, falling like a slowed avalanche towards the next supporting crease. The skin and the muscles, that were once tight, repel each other like enemies. The debris of suntan lotions, mascaras, alcohol, cigarettes, long-term prescription meds and MacDonald’s’ milk shakes, finally win over the body.

That time lapsed life, created a ‘permanent investment’ in ‘temporary insecurity’ but eventually it starts to weigh just for two reasons. We are sold ‘life’ as a ‘one-shot deal’ and our bodies sold as ‘our own’; not a borrowed space in a space suit on loan.

We imagine that age will not come upon us and in (standard) slow suicidal fashion, life trudges on, until…well we see no more future.

Can there be a future? Well there always is but a temporal, tattooed mother earth is it. I remember seeing an old tattooed woman as a person who almost certainly had been abused as a child but had gone on to find security working with other abused children in the circus. But that was when going to the circus was the thing. Nothing’s changed but the circus now comes to us in this new open asylum called city, with one benefit alone, it’s free to enter, although ‘free’ never used to mean ‘inescapable’ back then. 

Implicit the Explicit

I guess ‘voyeur’ is the new ‘curiosity’ as peeping toms look for new ways to peep, since what they found intriguingly private is now boringly public.

I remember growing up living on a dead-end cul-de-sac, we were somewhat of a community.

Amongst us there were, the kids who rode around on bikes, building ramps, who played run outs and a game that we called ‘had’ between picking blackberries in summer. Then there were the ‘big boys’ who were in their early teens and scared us with the hair on their legs. They smoked cigarettes, behind their parents’ backs, they swore and gathered around looking at stolen porn magazines for a closer understanding of the girls they would eventually encounter.

I once saw a nipple and it intrigued me for months. It naturally became something to aspire to as a young boy.

Fast-forward to today, (as a preteen) I can see all of the p**** I want in a Cardi B video, or Miley Sirus on YouTube (swinging naked, licking a jack hammer, on a wrecking ball) or at the very beginning of a Netflix movie.  

Women are no longer exclusive and young men aspire to something different, something they haven’t already sampled–nothing more needs to be said on that, with some imagination you will know why you’re young boy has an interest in the forbidden, explicit, elicit, same, sameness, especially with the authorised pride media grooming. 

And in the said same commercialised way, the Intrigue around tattoos was robbed from us. It was taken from the local Village tribe, personalized for their own understanding, and acceptably the punks, the freaks, the underground abstract artisan and then given to the football fan, the bank manager, the Taylor Swift fan.

But all of this, a testimony to the power of the CNN machine and recognition that there is nothing, I say again, there is nothing, outside of the influence’s scope of installment into any popular culture. I say this 20 years after being albeit respectfully being called my n**** by a teenage street vendor in Nairobi, Kenya, smoking a Philly Blunt.

Had the programs, that entered your subconscious mind (see it, say it, sorted) via your living room, not have accepted tattoos, pride, gang crime, immigrant preferences (like UK reign over Some alien), vaccine uptake, Donald Trump hatred, then love and hell… while we’re at it, exterminating Jews now Palestinians, would you be loving or hating of the tattoos on your neck?  Either way, the Next Generation, when they’ve seen enough, they’ll do like me, the opposite an invest in the beauty of an untainted space suit.

We certainly will not be 90 years old explaining why we have got a blue stripe going down our back resembling a bruise. And even if it does remain a picture, you may need a thousand words to describe why that picture.

I expect no love here but I do expect in the quiet of your mind (if you can ever find that space in a 5G life), accept that you move for acceptance outside and not content within. This need to be a part of the tribe that you don’t care to even know is why killing will always occur absent of morale.

I ask my eternal self, because they are burdensome and expensive to remove does this mean, that, they’re here forever, or will we have to wait for the fallible to die out? Wow, I guess that means almost everyone on earth.

It actually feels strange writing about everyone knowing maybe about 2% may agree, only because they refrained form skin marking and possibly a further 10% will swallow their pride and admit their regret.

I guess that leaves a majority having to love their commitment just because the trend remains current, justifying the mass thought but I assure you, the moment the associated press label tattoos a thing of yesterday, all will look towards the beauty of clean skin. If you think about it, (which nobody really has time to) it is actually now a unique thing to be appreciated.

But what does that say collectively about modern society, are they self-destructing? I guess only a psychologist or a person seasoned in looking within could answer this but ‘we surely will see’ and while these markings threaten to come alive this Halloween, I pride myself in maintaining a clean canvas waiting on my faithful assistance of time to do what it may.

By: Angel Lewis

For the Record

Angel Lewis is the author of Read This on The Train, Brush and the Forthcoming title: Blacks, Whites and other Stupid Fights.

https://qrib.co.uk/