Fast forward to today and I could be forgiven for thinking I was in Tenerife when walking down the high street, going to the pub or even being at work.
I can't remember when this first happened but there has been an explosion of people getting tattoos and sometimes I struggle to understand quite why this is. Now, before I go on don't misunderstand me, I have nothing against tattoos, I think if they are done right they can look good, I just wouldn't have one myself.
A lot of people who have tattoos have them as it is something unique, it shows their personality and their individuality but just how unique are tattoos nowadays? I mean if you have a Chinese symbol somewhere on your body then you are not in a unique group of people, quite the contrary, you are part of a very large group of people who share this taste. Likewise if you have a phrase written on your body, a Celtic design round your arm or a band your leg you are not unique, you are not individual you have merely copied a trend in the same way as say, people copy fashions in Top Shop.
There is a massive difference here though and that is that tattoos are for life. There is no doubt that they can now be called a trend. So what happens if they go out of fashion, what happens if having a Chinese symbol on your body becomes naff and outdated in the same way as say wearing flares or paisley shirts did in fashion? This for me would be the underlying worry with a tattoo. If you get a tattoo to remember a loved one then that is not going to out of fashion as it was never really in fashion but for other designs I can't help feeling that in 20 or 30 years time these may go out and maybe back in, to fashion.
The point of this post though was not to really discuss tattoos but individualism.
You see, with the advent of the Internet I believe that individualism is on the rise in all aspects of our society. Let me try and put this into context. If you walked round a city in the 90's and stopped people and asked them what their favourite TV programme was you would have got a lot of people saying the same name, likewise if you asked them the last album they bought it would have been similar and they would probably have been wearing similar clothes. Nowadays though, all that has changed and we don't watch the same things, we don't listen to the same music and we don't wear the same clothes.
This is of course mostly through choice, you can see with music especially that the range of artists we listen to now is much more diverse than it once was and the days of millions of singles being sold or millions of albums are on the slide. I have already discussed TV habits in a previous post and as for fashion well that is something that I believe is really changing especially with young people where there seems to be an anything goes sort of attitude. In my childhood, everyone wore the same thing or you were almost bullied! Now though, it is a symbol of how cool you are as to how different you dress. I have to say modern fashions are just something that I don't understand but one thing I do know is that there is a massive drive to be individual.
But if we are all getting tattoos, if we are all listening to different things, if we are all getting private number plates if we are all dressing differently how can we be individual? And that is my point, in trying to become individual all that happens is that people copy that "trend" so that they can also be individual and thus popularising it. By not having a tattoo I actually feel more unique and more of an individual as I ever have. In fact, I am almost self-conscious that I dont have one.
So next time I am on the beach and I find myself surrounded by people with tattoos on the beach, all wearing their cool clothes, listening to dub, trip-hop whilst I sit there with my tattoo-less body, my high street chain clothes and listening to my Beatles albums maybe those people will look at me and think "Wow, look at that guy, he's so unique and cool". Maybe not. In fact, definitely not.
