Illustrated Men

National Review, august 9, 1999

THE German was heavily tattooed, a North Sea Queequeg, but it was when he pulled his trousers down that the crowd finally reacted—with gasps, squeals, nervous laughter. It was not that Theodor—aus Hamburg—was particularly well endowed, just that he was hung like a chandelier designed by Torquemada. There were chains, studs, odd metal piercings, distinguishing characteristics that even Bill Clinton couldn't deny. Theodor's little striptease took place at the Second Annual New York City Tattoo Convention, three inky days in the Roseland Ballroom. Entering that gray, gloomy building you notice a plaque "In Honor of the Married Couples Who First Met Here," a list of names each with the date of that first happy encounter. What, I wondered, would the Lubes (from 1927) or even the Fortgangs (1961) have thought of Theodor?

They would have seen tattoos before. There have been professional tattooists in Manhattan for over 150 years. The Bowery's Sam O'Reilly invented the electric tattoo machine over a century ago. Its descendants were there at the Roseland, the sound of their needles like a swarm of wasps, their sting leaving not venom, but tiny dots of color.

Tattooing was a part of the rough carnival subculture that has long been an American staple, its vaudeville-era stars tattooists with names like "Painless Jack" Tryon, "Sailor George" Fosdick, and Lew "The Jew" Alberts. It may have been banned by God (Leviticus 19:28, since you ask), but in the United States tattooing was a small, half-licensed rebellion, a male-bonding process for tough guys. Marines, the boys in the fleet, even England's George V, a navy veteran, wore one.

The designs reflected tough-guy tastes. Anchors, devils, sailing ships, boxing gloves, daggers, Old Glory, a pair of dice, and, of course, "Mother." Other gals on view might include a busty "Miss Liberty," a bare-breasted mermaid, or a Hawaiian maiden with only a ukulele for modesty.

This brand of macho chic lives on. You could hear it in the Led Zeppelin that thundered through the Roseland's speakers. You could taste it in the Ballroom's bar, where people were drinking Bud and (glorious vision!) smoking. You could see it on the forearms and biceps of the bulky thirtysomethings in the crowd, burly dudes, all ponytails, denim, and tattoo.

But what was Theodor doing here. There was nothing very macho about him. He may have had an Iron Cross hanging from his nipple, but he was pretty weedy, not the sort of man that I'd want in my Wehrmacht. What he was, however, was an illustration of a society in evolution.

We tend to view cultural shifts in terms of some dramatic event: the arrival, say, of Marcel Duchamp at the Armory Show, or Elvis at Sun Records. But history isn't really like that. The greatest changes are, like Theodor's body, marked in countless tiny, mostly unpredictable ways.

And so the endless, tedious campaign against Western values has resulted not in their defeat in some watershed event, but in their gradual transformation, a transformation achieved by innumerable microscopic reevaluations of our culture. Even tattoos have now been reinterpreted. To be sure, there are many for whom a spot of ink is nothing more than what it always was: a bit of fun or, these days, a fashionably naughty gesture. We all know the type, the college girl with a flower above the ankle, the investment banker with enigmatic Chinese calligraphy on his shoulder. According to one estimate, 20 million Americans have been tattooed. But for another, smaller, more self-important crowd, the tattoo means something else. It is part of an imagined "tribal renaissance," an attempt to tap into the (allegedly) superior authenticity of those primitive folk who never left the squalor of the rain forest, mud hut, or atoll.

The problem is that these original noble savages were really just people with too much time on their hands and too few toys. They played with what they had, and what they had was their bodies. Consequently they didn't just tattoo. They pierced, they stretched, they cut, and they scarred.

And so, argue neo-tribalists, should we. At the Roseland, one man posed for gawkers by the door, his bald head a riot of color, his nose, in a nod to headhunter cool, pierced by a bone.

Others milled around inside, the sort of people, I suspected, unable to get through airport metal detectors without drama. Cheek rings glinting in the fluorescent light, these modern primitives searched for specialized merchandise tables, eyeing the latest in septum tusks and nostril screws from Pleasurable Piercings. If you're thinking this sounds more S & M than Samoa, you're probably right. This is not an authenticity that has to be accurate. It just has to annoy, alarm, or provoke. And so tattoos are also creeping across the body, far beyond the point where they can be concealed by a rolled-down sleeve or a buttoned shirt. That would imply discretion, the opposite of this definition of authenticity. The man with a tattooed face is walking graffiti, and we, hopeless conformists, are the bland, blank wall.

Or so he would like to believe. In fact, he's rebelling against an authority that exists only in his imagination. He's messed himself up for nothing. This illustrated man may be a primitive, yes, but only in the sense that he hasn't kept up with the times, in reality, as he fails to understand, nobody really cares what he does to himself. He'll regret it one day. He should get over it.

Oh, that's right. He can't. They don't come off.