BY ALEX STORY
In Tarzo, a small village a few miles from Vittorio Veneto, nestled in the Prosecco hills of Northern Italy, there is a lake.
Laghi di Revine is its name.
Its waters, resting helplessly under the sun, are hot.
The birds, at night so vocal, rest in stunned silence during the day.
All is slow and still.
Those who know seek shade or, better, a cave.
Those who know little, in their foolish ignorance, brave the heat’s hammer.
Wearing their inexperience as a useless shield, tourists throw down the gauntlet.
“Let us walk around the lake”, I proposed to my wife.
A good way, I thought, to simultaneously exercise and tan. With no suncream, of course.
“It is rather hot”, she replied, desperately looking for an exit.
“It won’t take long”, I assured her, just an hour and a half.
Off we trundled in our swimwear, quickly oppressed by the unbearable heat.
A little later, we saw an elderly woman and a young child.
She was rotund and wore a polyester double-knit space-dyed shift dress, the type respectable working-class women used to wear in the 1960s and 1970s.
Unlike these women, though, she had a tattoo on her left arm, which initially, from a distance, looked like a birthmark.
The art was a sleeve and rested on her seventy-year-old corpulent, wrinkled arm, at the level of her bicep.
The one-time colours had all faded into a dull greyish blue.
In time, the ink bled into blurry blobs, the kind of heavy feathering expected from writing on kitchen paper with a fountain pen.
From its worn features, the tattoo must have been around thirty years old, circa the 1990s.
Most tattoos before that were worn by convicts, soldiers and sailors.
They were also mostly self-made, with sewing needles, sharpened wires or, in extremis, a dressmaker’s pin.
And they were simple: an anchor, some letters, or a bulldog.
Like university degrees, few had them.
It is said they meant something.
They implied, most probably, a mysterious past life unconstrained by morals, and acted, to the outside world, as either a deterrent or a threat, or both.
So tough, in fact, were their implications that even Tintin’s weatherworn Captain Haddock didn’t have one.
A sleeve, on the other hand, required machinery, a shop and a system, the consequences of which were an inevitable proliferation and an inescapable cheapening.
But the crowds could follow.
The mysterious past disappeared and with it meaning and pregnant connotations vanished.
As American comedian Dan Soder, bemoaning his generation’s role in being “the cause of the fall of civilisation”, exclaimed over a decade ago:
“my generation ruined the Tattoo. We made the tattoo not scary“.
Indeed, David Beckham is covered in them.
What used to imply physical toughness became a show of meekness and acceptance.
Rebellion turned into submission.
Inexorably, oversupply led to devaluation.
“I’m not scared of a 22-year-old with an arm covered in seaweed”, Soder continued, ordering “a medium coffee with no milk” from Caleb, an imaginary and effete koi fish — a peace animal — tattoo-wearing barista.
Further back, in the mid-1990s, Viz Magazine featured “The Modern Parents” comic strip.
Upper-middle class, anxiously anti-establishment and hyper-liberal hippies, Cressida and Malcolm allowed Tarquin, their son, to have a tattoo to foster his “individuality” and “artistic expression“.
In the strip, he goes to school, rolls up his sleeves and shows his friends his ink, declaring:
“I wanted to stand out from the crowd and be an individual”.
To which all his friends roar: “I want one”; “me too”; “me too”.
And so, they did.
Indeed, today, in Italy, our granny is not on her own.
One-in-two have tattoos there.
Swedes and Americans are not too far behind in the field of excoriation.
In the United Kingdom, around 14 million people, or 31% of the entire population, are “branded“.
However, nearly 40% of people aged between 16 and 54 have at least one mark.
That grew from fewer than 5% in the 1950s.
In short, tattooing today is like smoking a few decades ago.
Everybody does it, everywhere.
It is also an “asset”, if we can call it that, that depreciates at the same speed as time passes by.
And that is very fast indeed.
As I walked into the harshest of suns, my long-suffering wife by my side, I kept thinking that as more tattoo wearers reach their canonical years, the fashion might dwindle and eventually disappear.
As evidence grows to the point of undeniability, youngsters might decide that, as old folks and every cat and its dog have them, having tattoos is no longer about finding one’s own “individuality” and “artistic expression”, in Cressida and Malcolm’s words, but more about fitting into a metro life in which all has been rendered cheap and meaningless, not least through overproduction.
To be different in the future, not having one could be edgy.
We might then rediscover what the ancients knew.
Remembering two things.
Firstly, tattoos, or branding, in the ancient world, were often used by the powerful to mark their slaves or cattle.
Secondly, Leviticus 19:28 tells us: “Do not … put tattoo marks on yourselves”.
Because that is what pagans did.
And it is perhaps what we have become, I thought, lumbering in the unbearable heat as we completed our walk around Laghi di Revine, flushed from the heat, desperate for shade, and branded, albeit temporarily, a fool by the sun.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.