Inspired by a certain someone, I renewed my zest for blogging, not only because I find it healthy to, but also out of tedium (or a lack of conversationalist, with JM being away). Anyway swimming in the the grey matter these days has been the idea of getting a body-tattoo. Sure MC and JM have advised unanimously, against such extreme artistic epxression through irreversible body art. To allay my impulses, JM called me "a bad girl". Honey, I don't mind labels much. MC went as far as to suggest that no decent man'll want to marry someone who looks like a gangster in the bedroom, his reasoning was that "pre-coitus and at the point of mutually disrobing, any man's sexual interest will take a dive when he realises the fair maiden he is in love with is in fact a Dragon-lady". LOL. Nice try MC, you almost convinced me. Except, I wasn't considering the the image of an expanded dragon skeleton. Rather, I am looking to to get a mod just about the size of a 50 cent coin. I have even researched on the motif already, and I swear it's got absolutely nothing to do with fire-spewing dragons or ash-rising pheonixes, thank you very much.
I will however consider your point about your not having had, a purchase whose novelty outlasted the impulse. The point is, tattoos are symbollic meanings, and I don't foresee me getting bored with the meaning behind the motif in point. And it will not be an impulse buy, which I will prove by assigning a year's idle moments to making the ultimate decision. So your theory can't stick.
If anything, I am worried of most people's reaction to my sudden dive to the wild side (perhaps even contemplating about it suggests the overtly-animalistic side to me). I do assure that if getting a tattoo means I am in fact untamed, perhaps we all misunderstood me.
I can't help but notice the huge stigma attached to the idea of pierced body art. The social view of tattoos infers to vocabulary like Gangster, Convict, Ill-bred, Arrogant, Hooligan. The litany of negative connotations is endless.
A Hitstory take on the orgins of tattoo doesn't help clear the bad repute. History teems with examples of involuntary scarification; slaves' or tribes' motifs branding, or gang-identifications' modification. These stories (often gory) emphasize on the tale-worthy side of Body Modification by choosing to concentrate on the great physical torment and mental anguish, prior and post scarification and how the mental effects of body modification alters the mind no less irreversibly than the act itself. With stories like that, it is perhaps no wonder that voluntary scarification gets hardly a decent nod. After all, which sane person will agree it is sane to want to self inflict pain and scar?
Perhaps what I do agree with from these allegories is the association between this form of Art and its alteration of the mind, albeit, I believe it can happen both ways. Let's just talk about justifications of people whose mental anguish toward a subject is so overwhelming that they decide that the only way to augment it is to flaunt it (through an image) or "translate" the tormenting mental repression into the physical, so that their pain is in a way "shared" with all who come into visual contact with the tattoo transcribed (tattoo as expressions of their identity), they call it "wearing" the pain. Publicizing pain through Body Art so that it may be shared may seem perverse to most, but neither can most people understand real psychological loads so weighty that it requires purging of such compromised standard to release.
Comparing justifications for Body Art between the past and present ages is like comparing happiness levels between the neanderthal and post-capitalist being. Comparisons of this sort, even if endeavored is futile and ultimately non conclusive.
Anyway for those grippling that this Genie may turn into a dragon-lady overnight, your fear is mostly unfounded. I still have 346 days of musing to do.
