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10 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, December 1, 2010 Basic Black by Arthur Black Tit for tat When I was sixteen I went to sea for the summer with a crew of Jamaicans on an oil tanker that ran between Halifax and Venezuela. I came back in the fall to start Grade Twelve with thirty-six dollars, a rather impressive repertoire of Spanish and Jamaican expletives... And a tattoo. Nothing flamboyant ­ a simple anchor with a banner entwined around it, all discreetly drilled into my upper right arm. Such a piddly tattoo wouldn't have raised an eyebrow in Halifax, St. John's or Vancouver but I lived in rural southern Ontario. Deepest Landlubberville. There was no tradition in those parts of going to sea and certainly no history of inking one's carcass. I stood out. My English teacher took one look at my shiny tattoo and sniffed, "Two types of people get tattoos: pirates and jailbirds." Music to my ears. I was suddenly an N.G.O.C. -Notorious Guy On Campus. Times change. To achieve notoriety on campus nowadays you'd have to be the only student without a tattoo. Nowadays, girls have them. Geeks and nerds have them. Hell, the teachers have them. No surprise. Humankind has been fascinated with tattoos for ages. Ancient Egyptians fooled around with tattoos as did most every culture from the High Arctic to Polynesia. In 1991 scientists chipped the frozen corpse of a Late Stone Age hunter out of an Alpine glacier and guess what they found on his body? Fifty-seven tattoos -- on his back, behind one knee and around both ankles. The hunter died about 5,300 years ago. The tattoos weren't fancy; just squiggles and dots really. Not like the ones you see today. Modern tattoos are expansive, intricate and more colourful than a Toller Cranston canvas. Complicated, too. There's a woman in Toronto who has Jack Kerouac all over her back. The closing lines from Kerouac's novel On the Road run across her dorsal surface from left collarbone to lower right ribcage. And just in case some random reader isn't familiar with the work there's an image of Kerouac hunched over a typewriter superimposed over the script. It's pretty impressive, but, if I may be so bold...what's the point? I get the erotic potential of a butterfly on the buttock or a pixie dancing up a thigh -- but half a novel on your back? You'd have to join a nudist camp to be appreciated. Even then you'd always be standing still for slow readers. There's some evidence that the tattoo cult has jumped the shark. The actress Susan Sarandon has the names of her kids tattooed down her spine (is she worried she'll forget?) When Lindsay Lohan gets bored (which is often, apparently) she can always look down at her right wrist and read her mantra: STARS: ALL WE ASK FOR IS OUR RIGHT TO TWINKLE. And then there's the actress Megan Fox, who is rapidly transforming herself into a walking Bookmobile. One of her more recent tattoos is a disjointed line of text that rambles across her belly from right hip to left breast. It reads: "Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music." "It's a quote from Nietzsche," Fox explained to a TV interviewer airily. Except it isn't. Nietzsche never said it. It's an Urban Legend. Like Sarah Palin's grasp of geography. That's the thing about tattoos. If you're going to get one with words in it, you should make sure your designated mutilator consults a dictionary. Unlike the woman who had a ruby red heart tattooed on her chest and below it, the caption in large flowing cursive: BEAUTIFUL TRADGEDY. Or the guy who paid a lot of dough to have his personal motto needled into his back in huge gothic letters. It reads: I'M AWSOME. Even tattoos without words in them can prove embarrassing. Never forget the one law that none of us can break ­ the law of gravity. 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