Tattoo Questions: Tattoos Getting More Popular?

There was a time when a tattoo was something a sailor or a criminal had, and that was about it. At least for most of us, as far as we knew back in the day, ordinary people just didn’t have a tattoo. But today it seems that everywhere you look are tattoo sites that talk about tattoos (like this one!) and there are books filled with all kinds of tattoo designs. You turn on the TV and someone is running around, with a tattoo showing quite clearly. But are we just more open about them or do more people actually have a tattoo design or multiple tattoo designs on their bodies?

Well, according to a site that claims to be the “world’s largest online tattoo museum”, we are not only more open about the tattoo designs we have, but more of us are getting a tattoo as well. The site, called The Vanishing Tattoo even has some information to back up that claim. They say that Harris Polls, which is a pretty reliable source, conducted a poll back in 2003 and estimated that around 16 percent of all Americans have at least one tattoo.

Now, when you compare that to a poll conducted by Life Magazine back in 1936 that is pretty hefty. Back then, only 6% of the population had a tattoo. Of course, it may be that it was just 6% were willing to admit they had a tattoo. In 1936 you pretty much were a low-life if you had a tattoo, or at least that was the assumption being made at the time.

Still, if you fast forward to 2006, seventy years later, a Pew Research poll shows us that between the ages of 18 and 25 36% of the US population has at least one tattoo. But what is much more surprising is that when you look at people between 26 and 40, the number goes up to 40%. So this looks like around the 60s through to the 80s a whole lot of us went out and got a tattoo. The flower children were doing much more than just going to Woodstock and making babies, apparently.

But I still think it feels like everyone around us has a tattoo, and that they are not only more common, they are more acceptable as a whole. True, some folks are getting theirs removed, but that is mostly just getting ones done in the heat of the moment or truly ugly tattoos. But for tattoo designs we have come to love, I think the tattoo question of the hour is: are tattoos now part of the culture? I think they may well be.  There are hundreds of tattoo sites to pick out a tattoo design and no one thinks it is shocking anymore. In fact, except for those ugly tattoos like the ones that spell out HATE on knuckles and such, most tattoos are real works of art.

So what is your vote on this one? Am I being too much of a dreamer to think that tattoos are here to stay and just part of who we are now or are they simply a very visible sub-culture and will never be mainstream. Do we even want them to be mainstream?