By Col Curmudgeon
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It was my intention to pick up where I left off last week because I was really starting to warm to my theme.
Then I got distracted, which I know you will find unusual for the Curmudgeon.
It happened when I was walking down the main street in our nearby town.
Maybe I have been a bit slow off the mark, or just not paying attention.
But suddenly I am noticing tattoos.
Everywhere!
On men and women, young blokes, and even younger girls!
What the hell is going on?
And I am not talking just one little ‘Mother’ on an arm.
These people are painted from head to toe in technicolour.
Now when the old Col was a lad, the only person I ever knew with a tattoo was an old uncle of mine who served in the navy and came home from the war with an anchor and the name of his ship — all in dark blue.
By the time I was in my teens, his tattoo had faded, and parts had sunk into the wrinkles on his arm.
That, however, cannot be said of some of the sights I have been witness to of late.
I saw a young woman walking towards me the other day.
She had tatts on both thighs, front and back, as well as on her calves and ankles.
And when she walked past me I noticed a couple on her feet, several on her arms and finally, to cap it all off, in flowing scroll, ‘No Regrets’ across the back of her neck.
I shuddered to think what might be smeared across the rest of her body had she been in a bikini.
In the end, so fascinated was I by this primeval urge to revert to our pagan past, I actually stopped one bloke and asked him if I could have a look at his. In the name of research, of course!
Well, bugger me, but he had covered just about every phase of his still very young life.
He had the names of his two children printed the length of his inner arms, his late grandparents and three mates wrapped in all sorts of bizarre imagery on his outer arms, across his legs, on his chest and back and creeping up his neck.
Topped off by three tears coming from his left eye.
Some of the tattoos were actually old ones coloured over with new shapes (possibly former girlfriends that his missus did not like going to bed with each night) but I felt it was wise not to pry.
Apart from being lit up like a neon light, this bruiser was almost twice your correspondent’s size and while seemingly good-natured there has always been this sense of danger around anyone so bedecked.
Well, there was when I was a whippersnapper.
I should have stopped that girl too, and asked her what she had done that she needed ‘No Regrets’ plastered above her collar line across the back of her neck.
I could have suggested something, like the regrets she will have when she is 40-something and gravity, and possibly motherhood, starts distorting the ‘art’ (truly, that’s what they call it).
But the one who took the cake was the guy — who had to be late 20s, or maybe early 30s — who had these massive holes in his earlobes, with some sort of thing jammed in there to keep them open.
I was agog.
I have never had anyone turn up for a job on the farm looking like that.
The odd tatt, sure, but this is insane.
Whatever these idiots think they are achieving they are wrong.
They might as well have a flashing light on their heads announcing them as morons.
But if tatts are the big thing today I wish I had a few loose dollars to invest in what I know has to be the next big thing.
Laser clinics to get rid of them as these halfwits grow up and their IQ finally exceeds their age.