What is the difference between tradition and cliché?
A current topic running the gamut on the Internet is tattoo clichés. Now one thing I do not agree with is putting down anyone’s body art, (Unless, of course, they happen to have been dumb enough to get a scratch job. But that’s another subject.), and someone’s choice to get a tattoo that somebody else thinks of as cliché, is for the better part a nod to the history of tattooing.
Think about it. Almost any “old school” tattoo could very well be looked upon as cliché. As a matter of fact some of the tattoos that have been listed as cliché are ones that have been a part of tradition for ages. Such as a Nautical star, skulls, roses, blue birds, flowers on the ankle, etc, etc.
So, what?? Since when did we as a community become tattoo snobs? What on earth gives anyone the right to put someone else’s choice of body art down simply because it was popular enough for more than one person to have it done? Trust me some of these rants against so called cliché tattoos go so far as to question the person’s hygiene and manhood, among other things, simply because of their choice of art and placement.
Bad form!
They do not know all of these people personally, and have no idea as to what kind of person they are. Making such judgments reeks not only of “nose in the air” snobbery, but also of plain, outright cyber bullying. What in Hell gives anyone the right to question a person’s character just because of his or her choice of tattoo?
There was a time when just having a tattoo, regardless of what the subject, or placement, labeled the person with all kinds of lies and prejudiced presuppositions along these very same lines. Now we are going to act just like the anal-retentive snobs who put us down?
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot???!!!
News flash: Just because you have a custom back piece by a name artist does not give you the right to say that having a neck tattoo is a flimsy cover for feelings of sexual inadequacy. Neither does it allow you to infer that any woman who has a lower back tattoo has an infestation below the waist.
I used to think that because of all the prejudice and preconceptions the tattoo community went through just to get to this budding area of acceptance we now enjoy, that perhaps, just perhaps, we were above spewing such hypocritical garbage.
Now, I am not so sure. Hate rhetoric like this kind of article mongering garbage should only set the tattoo community back a few hundred years; or at the very least make us look exactly like the assholes who hate any kind of tattoos in the first place: “See…even people with tattoos know that most of their kind are a waste of humanity!!”
I’m so pissed, I won’t even grace this snobbish crap with a link. If you want to see it, type “tattoo cliché” into google. All I can say to the hypocrites putting it out is, “Well done, well done indeed.”