Is that thing is somehow connected to Planescape:T?
It’s too bad saying “IYO” won’t make your tattoo look any less trashy to everyone else, otherwise my opinion might actually be as meaningless as you’re trying to pretend it is.
I’m not kidding when I say people who have tattoos have to work twice as hard to earn my respect and half as hard to lose it. But go ahead and ignore that. It’s not like my opinion is shared by the vast majority of people in the civilized world, or anything.
It’s a combination of the Rune of Torment and the tattoo of Deionarra TNO has on his arm. You can see it when you go into the menu.
Because ink on a person’s skin = bad person
My Gap Girls wanted everyone to get drunk one night and get The Gap logo tattooed. I just shook my head and left as fast as I could.
Besides, why get a tattoo when you could just brand yourself? That’s so much more hardcore.
I gave myself a tattoo of an anarchy heart on my chest.
The upside is it’s a cool-looking symbol that’s not forseeable for me to suddenly stop identifying with. Unless I either get radically conservative to the point of literally hating freedom, or gain an inexplicable hatred for the emotion of love, I think the symbol for “love is freedom” is a solid bet.
The downside is that it has been mistaken for a heartagram five times in the year since I made it. Also, the home-made-ness makes it kinda jankety looking.
I also really want a Little Prince tattoo with the associated quote on my back, backed by the Red vs. Blue logic that it actually was something I liked ten years ago that I still love.
It being mistook for a heartagram is still better than being mistook for a penisagram.
Unless you like penisagrams.
If no one else had a tattoo, you wouldn’t say to yourself, “Hey, let’s permanently mar this shit into my skin, because that’s the best way to express myself artistically!”
People get tattoos because they want to fit in with other followers of the trend. They get them for the tiny fraction of a hope that someone random they don’t even know will be so overwhelmingly impressed by how deep and layered they’re trying to appear, that they’ll make a new friend or get laid or whatever. Of course no one who has a tattoo would ever admit it, but it’s just one more desperate, weak, and insecure way to artificially increase your cool-factor. In other words, it’s one more way to avoid alienating people you don’t mean shit to because somewhere along the line you got it in your head that if absolutely everyone isn’t always pleased with you 100% of the time, you’re doing something wrong.
I know for a fact that most people would agree with me when I say I don’t really have the patience to interact with anyone that vain. I want friends who are conspicuously on my side, not social whores who’d abandon me for people who don’t even matter.
I’m not saying everyone who has even a single tattoo is prone to fuck you over or anything, but they’re definitely an outward expression of vanity, unreliability, and cowardice to some extent. I have friends with tattoos, but I’ve never met anyone with a tattoo who I’d consider “solid.” Never. And those friendships are definitely strained.
So no, having ink on your skin doesn’t make you a bad person. But the decision to get a tattoo will make people second guess your character, for sure. I’m not saying that’s the way it should be. I’m just saying that’s the way it is.
What if you meet someone who has tattoos because it’s a part of his cultural heritage and had it done in the traditional method? Like a native Samoan who went out into the civilized world?
Hades is just upset he doesn’t really fit in with people he thinks is cool and will probably never have sex
I’ve met several practicing lawyers (mainly defense attorneys) with tattoos. You would never know till you saw them in short sleeves, or till they mentioned having tattoos. They were certainly more solid than an average guy on the street. I know several students at NYU Law with tattoos. People I expected to have tattoos had them; people I didn’t expect to have tattoos also had them. Both groups are “reliable” as friends and in their work.
Your argument seems to be this: Having a tattoo shows that, on an emotional impulse, you’d go and make a permanent, (potentially) life-altering decision that you may regret. This means you’re unreliable in emotionally trying situations.
Maybe that’s true. On the other hand, the “safest” people, who won’t risk distinguishing themselves for fear of being rejected, are often the most emotionally tender or insecure of all. Someone who genuinely <i>wants</i> a tattoo - or wants to grow long hair, write fantasy novels, explore Europe while playing guitar for tips, or experiment with an open relationship - may be concerned that society will scorn and exclude him. So out of fear, he declines to do all the things he wants to do. As a coping mechanism (rather than admit his cowardice), he cultivates scorn for people who <i>do</i> risk distinguishing themselves. Because he was too tender or insecure to live his dreams for fear of being scorned, and thus was disappointed with life, he now scorns others brave enough to live their dreams. Strangely, he tells himself, “If I can’t do all the outlandish things I want to do, that means there’s something wrong with doing outlandish things.” He constructs a whole self-reinforcing morality, which may say 1) outlandish behavior is flat-out wrong, or more cleverly 2) outlandish behavior is a sign of deeper problems in a person (e.g. unreliability). That way, his cowardice is “actually” a sign of deeper wellness.
Who’s more reliable: the person who caves to emotional impulses, or the one who represses his desires because he’s so <i>afraid of what other people think</i>? Does the “reliable” person flee conflict or live out his divisive beliefs? Fear-induced reliability is effective because it overrides personal beliefs, but ineffective the moment the source of fear is removed. Belief-induced reliability is effective because it requires no external stimulus, but ineffective because people’s beliefs rarely coincide completely. Honestly, I don’t know what type of reliability is more valuable. But I think this post indicates which I find more personally attractive.
Fucking poser, man! (<984)
I didn’t say it was meaningless. I just said it was your opinion, nothing less, nothing more, which it actually is. You are supposing that “everyone else” agrees with you, which doesn’t seem true even based on a small (biased) sample of answers here.
I’m not kidding when I say people who have tattoos have to work twice as hard to earn my respect and half as hard to lose it. But go ahead and ignore that. It’s not like my opinion is shared by the vast majority of people in the civilized world, or anything.
They’ll probably manage to scrape by anyway 
Disregarding the factuality of your last sentence, that still doesn’t form an argument. Fifty years ago every respectable citizen who didn’t wear a suit was considered a bum, but nowadays noone cares if you wear jeans or wear your hair long. My middle school didn’t have a problem with tattoos and average people in Barcelona certainly don’t.
Why don’t you discount then every other activity that involves expression? These poets must be the vainest of people, presuming people care about their view on things! Doesn’t it strike you as weird that you are stereotyping a large number of people? I also heard all Germans are methodical, humorless and make appliances in their spare time.
As for vanity, does that include trousers specifications? 
I was going for a penisagram, but they are hard to draw, and every stroke just made it harder.
Actually, evidently, someone did do that, meaning it’s not altogether that unlikely a conclusion to reach. I think little kids draw on themselves long before they know anything about tattoos, I remember doing it all the time. All in all, I don’t think it’s really that unlikely a conclusion. It evolved in enough places seemingly independantly that I seriously doubt it’s the tragic symptom of the MTV generation’s post-modern conditional homogeny.
Like, say, playing guitar?
Wouldn’t this indicate that the sort of person you describe would not get a tattoo, so as not to displease you?
So, really, your hatred of tattoos is based around the fact that you think anyone who has a tattoo will “abandon” you? Now, which one is insecure?
I could say the same of someone who wears clothes. Especially if they seem particularly concerned with the aesthetic appeal of their clothes, enough so to begin a conversation solely to ask for advice on what clothes to wear.
You know Hades, those friendships being strained? Yeah, that might be because of you and your view of these people as much as is because of them being flakes, or whatever. I know a few people who either have, or want to have a tattoo. I’ve seen no correlation between the desire and the level of flakiness of an individual. Hell, the most dependable person I know (speaking in terms of sticking by you, giving you a loan if he can afford to/you need it, has a job) wants a tattoo really badly, he just can’t decide what he wants.
On the other hand, out of the least dependable people I know, only one has a tattoo.
Also, sometimes it is just another way to express themselves artistically. 
Seeing as out of the people I know who have them, it’s split about half and half between people who give a shit what people they don’t know think and people who don’t give a shit and probably never will. Stop assuming your experience applies to everything, ever.
While I agree with most of what Xwing said there’s one more thing that I think should be addressed. And that is why get a tattoo in the first place? It’s much simpler to do things like grow out your hair and then take a picture of yourself and the photo should last just as long if not longer than any tattoo, and the same thing can be said with manuscripts and relics collected from a trip across Europe.
To me getting a tattoo is like making an AMV video on Youtube. Many people do it for many reasons for some it’s to express their fandom, for others it may be to enter some kind of competition, and there are others who are simply trying to be creative with them, and so on.
My point is that while there are some who get tattoos because of things like peer pressure or drunken stupors there are also those who view tattoos as an art or simply because they want one to express their feelings consequences be damned.
Which brings me back to my earlier opinion in which I don’t believe that tattoos are necessary to express yourself in most cases, but if you still want to have one then that’s your decision.
Tattoos just need to be available in easily removable ink. It baffles me that we can send men to the moon and not create an easily removable tattoo. Of course tattoo artists would probably refuse to use said ink, but fuck them.
We already have easily removable tattoos. The problem is that they’re too easy to remove and are rendered worthless or completely gone within a day.
Henna lasts longer, but I see it’s illegal in the U.S.
edit: The wiki said FDA didn’t allow importing it for skin use (but was ok for dying hair). Never trust the wiki.
Henna tattoos aren’t illegal in the US.
I wouldn’t say tatoos are a sign of flakiness so much as they’re a sign of conformism. In the old days tatoos were socially unacceptable to a lot of people, so if you got one, people would get on your case and you actually had to back up your shit about being a “badass”. Now tatoos are practically like getting your ears pierced - its something everybody does and society at large is comfortable with. I constantly see these teenage girls with the infamous “large tatoo right above the butt”. Its become akin to buying a trendy pair of sneakers.