Tattoo

For this assignment I decided to talk about tattoos as a form of self expression vs social expression.

I think, on some level, a tattoo has elements of both forms of expression. Let's take, for example, the tattoo that I would get if I were to get one (which I won't, because the fact remains that it's quite bad for you). The tattoo that I would want would go down the front of my lower leg, with the text "kaze ni omoi no tsuki ni nagai wo/chikaru aru kagiri ikitekunda kyou mo" (in kanji, not romanji (english letters)). It is a lyric from my favorite song, Asterisk, meaning roughly "try to convey your feelings to the wind, your wishes to the moon, and continue to live as long as you have the strength".

That obviously relates to my oft-pointed-out taste community, the Japan/anime obsessed (aka otaku) crowd. It's in Japanese, from a Japanese song, that I only know about because it was a theme song to one of my (debatably) favorite anime. But, despite that, it actually has a good deal to do with me as a person. One of the reasons that is my favorite song is because of that quote, and the reason I like that quote is because it deals with my personal love of life and feelings about the importance of connecting with others.

If I did elect to get a tattoo and chose that one, it would have been greatly influenced by my likes and dislikes (in turn affected by my personal perception of cool), but after that I am still the primary deciding factor in exactly what it is. There are so many variants on cool out there that even if you throw the same exact slips of paper into a person's hat they'll still pull out something slightly different each time.

I think it's the same way for most people. There are some people whose thought process was something like "this is in right now, I think I'll make a permanent modification to my body based on it", but on a whole I think most people have a society-influenced but overall personal connection to their tattoos. Taste communities go far beyond just cool, after all; they seep into your psyche and influence everything, from your likes and dislikes to the way you walk. But once you accept that influence as an unavoidable factor, it's still possible to see the different outcomes of the same equation.