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Yesterday I reread Bellweather by Connie Willis, a speculative fiction novel about a sociologist statistician and a biologist chaos theorist trying to determine how fads originate. I really like most of Willis’s stuff, but this might be one of my favorites. Every chapter opens with a blurb about a fad:

tattoos (1691)– Self-mutilation fad which first became popular in Europe in the 1600s when explorers brought the practice back from the South Seas. The fad recurred as an upper-class craze in the Edwardian era. Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill’s mother, had a snake tattooed around her wrist. Tattooing became popular again in World War II, this time among servicemen and especially sailors, again in the sixties as part of the hippie movement, and yet again in the late eighties. Tattooing has the disadvantage of being a passing fad with permanent results.

It seems like the latest tattoo fad is probably on the way out, if not already out (it’s hard to gauge these things from the Midwest), but I think tattooing has also achieved a niche status–as a fad, piercing has the edge on it since piercings are a lot easier to remove/conceal/change your mind about, but there are always SOME people getting tattoos, aren’t there? It’s just that frequently it’s a marker of being “low class.” Having grown up in semi-rural Missouri, I may have an inflated idea of the prevalence of tattoos in the general population.

My father has a Grateful Dead tattoo, which he got done in the 1970s, when all his friends rolled their eyes and told him it was “a really 60s thing to do” (proving Willis’s point up there, I guess). I got my first tattoo in 2001, when it was certainly popular among college kids in northern Missouri–and it was also a Chinese character, which people frequently give me shit about, but it does actually mean what I thought it did and it doesn’t say “love” or some shit like that, so I’m not embarrassed.

It says, in fact, “morning tide.” Just a little reminder that everything changes, and new things begin–or not so new things. Winston Churchill’s mother, remember. You can’t get away from the cycles of the world.

Tattoo #3 is a two-character compound: “eldest daughter.” Tattoo #2 is Celtic knotwork and on my lower back to boot. Clearly my tattoos are not untouched by prevailing trends, but at least I didn’t pick any of them off the wall at the tattoo parlor.

couéism (1923)– Psychology fad inspired by Dr. Emile Coué, a French psychologist and the authory of Self-Mastery by Auto-Suggestion. Coué’s method of self-improvement consisted of knotting a piece of string and reciting over and over, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better.” Died out when it became apparent no one was.

It’s the new year, and I have a couple of resolutions and a buttload of work to do. Hopefully it’s morning tide time, and not just more of the same. I don’t know. The other side of it, of course, is that the tide goes whether you like it or not.

Upon some consideration, I think that the people who would identify me as “indie” are the same people who think that I have “a lot” of tattoos.

Although this is also a question of group membership. To a person with zero or one tattoos, I think my three tattoos generally seem like “a lot.” To a person with three tattoos, they often seem like “time for another one.”

I made a rule when I got tattoo #1 that I would not get more than one tattoo per calendar year, and I have held to that. Of course, given that I got my last one in March of 2004, I am free to get another one now, but summer is a bad time for it. The last thing you want with a new tattoo is a sunburn.

Well, actually the LAST thing you want with a new tattoo is a motorcycle accident, but I’m not really at risk for that. The fact that I’ve made it to July without a serious sunburn, on the other hand, is a minor miracle.

Anyway, I still don’t have a firm design for tattoo #4. I know I want the symbol for Scorpio, but I’ve vacillated about whether or not I want to incorporate the symbols for Pisces and Aries as well (my moon sign and ascendent, respectively), and it’s hard to find a really nice astrological symbol for a tattoo anyway. They’re either too plain and blocky or hideously ornamented. I definitely don’t want a Scorpio symbol that incorporates a scorpion in any way.

My other general rule about tattoos is that I should want the specific design for at least six months before committing it permanently to my skin, so I guess I won’t be getting anything before 2006.

I’ve seen some fucking bizarre tattoos lately. On Tuesday when I went to the psych building to do my $10 experiment (they made me put a pen in my mouth and read words off a computer screen), I saw a girl with a giant bumble bee on her bicep, so detailed that it almost looked like a scientific illustration, and today at the thrift store I saw a girl with a giant olive, pierced by little cocktail skewers, on HER bicep. This seems like it couldn’t have been done with any intent but irony, but would anyone commit to having such an ironic tattoo on them forever?

For a person with three tattoos, I’m kind of snobby about them. Or maybe people with three tattoos are generally snobby about tattoos, while everyone else just winces at them indiscriminately, I don’t know. A woman at the wedding I attended last week thought that the one on my shoulder, which is the Chinese/Japanese two character compound for “eldest daughter,” was “nice,” and told me that she hates tattoos but when her daughter got one, “at least it was of the Trinity.” So some members of the anti-tattoo crowd are willing to make exceptions for designs that are particularly removed from bare-breasted mermaids with scrolls that say “MOM.”

I guess I might be okay with a bare-breasted mermaid on someone (not me). I really like mermaids. But a giant fucking olive? I draw the line.