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Jim Buckley's avatar

Yikes! Whoa, easy on the reins there, Katy. Poor Calla; she just wanted to relate a positive tale of generational communications. Instead, she is beat up and berated by an angry woman. Anyone who believes scarring their face or body with a pile of tattoos is "embracing alternate forms of expression" is fooling themselves. They're just dedicated followers of fashion and mostly will rue what they've done twenty or thirty years down the road. Unfortunately, those things don't come off as easily as bell bottoms. You go, Calla. Be proud that your grandchildren are listening to your common sense!

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Pat Fish's avatar

In the tattoo community we like to say that tattoos will attract people you'd like to get to know, and repel those you'd just as soon not meet. I've been tattooing in Santa Barbara for four decades, and consider the work I do an externalization of internal aesthetics. Sometimes they are memorials for a loved one, sometimes enthusiasm for ethnic identity, sometimes permanent jewelry or expressions of appreciation for the beauty in our natural world. They've been a part of the human experience forever, and there have always been judgemental people who disdain those who choose to have them. I'll be the first to agree that certain subject matter gives a very negative clue to the personality of the wearer, and to that point I personally won't tattoo any satanic or evil imagery. I'd rather not touch that person who chooses that dark path. But for the vast majority of tattooed people their epidermal embellishments are their own choice of something that means a lot to them. And I will guess that for every tattoo this author has seen and disliked there are dozens of people she knows who have tattoos they have not shown to her, because they are none of her business.

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