Are Tattoos One-way Conversations On Skin?

I've talked with many about how the practice of people riding the subway, jogging through the park, just walking the street--all the while wearing ear phones which connect them with something, anything but the sounds around them--has chilled the opportunity to engage in spontaneous conversation with those around them.

For example, I am sitting in a Manhattan subway just now in Manhattan and note that all but about a dozen people in this crowded subway are disconnected, via their ear buds, from the rest of us. 

So I've gotten used to the fact that many people in the city don't speak with the people around them.

But it just dawned on me that a surprising number of these people on the subway today are speaking to me and others through another medium: their tattoos.  Has there been something in the drinking water lately that has caused so many people to get themselves tattooed?  Or is the hot weather just exposing more skin so I'm acutely aware of all the artwork?  Not just one or a couple of them...LOTS of them.  In some cases the tattoos literally cover their skin with messages.  So they are talking at us, sometimes shouting at us, through their tattoos.

It is a one-way conversation, to be sure.  The messages are about their deeply held respect for particular institutions or organizations (U.S. Marines, Harley Davidson) to their brand loyalty (New York Yankees, Apple computer) to their love interest (Mom, Georgina or Marie or David or Jose or whomever).

So they are talking.  At anyone who sees them.  But apparently they have no interest in our response to their messages.  Because even if we voiced our reaction, they wouldn't hear it.  They've got those ear phones on.

 

 

 

Comments

[Vendita Giubotti Belstaff]

Very, very nicely done!

[uterine fibroid treatment]

what are they called... like the ones that say love/hate and stuff like that