If I keep referencing Graham and Maria Wanging videos, perhaps I need to make them a separate category.

In any case, once upon a time, it seemed that about the only people who got tattoos were prisoners and sailors (assuming we include Marines in there as the Marines are part of the Navy).

I didn’t think much about tattoos then as there wasn’t much to think about. Those who got them had the good sense to get one or two on their biceps and perhaps on their forearms and that was about it. The full body tattooed people (“Lydia the Tattooed Lady”) were mainly confined to the freak shows of carnivals and such. Or Groucho’s songs.

Then starting sometime in the 90s, tattoos became a thing. It suddenly seemed that one wasn’t a member of whatever crowd one wanted to be a member of without being able to show that you had endured the pain of body art, or whatever it was they were calling it.

At that I point I came squarely down against the practice.

Oh, I don’t really care what anyone does to their body. That’s pretty much their own business. I simply don’t want to have to see it!

So if you get a tattoo somewhere where I’ll never see. Fine. Good on you. I don’t understand, but there’s no need for me to understand, that’s entirely your own decision. There are lots of things I don’t understand.

Of course there’s the health angle. Do you really know where that tattoo needle has been? How about that tattoo artist? Do you really trust that guy?

If you get a tattoo on a visible part of your body, I might roll my eyes (behind your back, of course), but still, it’s only a minor blemish.

What I really cannot stand, what really and truly, and literally, in the dictionary definition of that word, makes my skin crawl, are those tattoos that cover huge swaths of the body. Like an entire arm, what they call a sleeve, for example.

Those to me look like horrible, flesh-eating skin diseases. And I don’t like to look at horrible, flesh-eating skin diseases. I try my best to avert my eyes.

But enough about me.

Graham and Maria received a question about tattoos, specifically whether it’s ok to tell your boyfriend not to get a tattoo. Clearly my answer would be very different from theirs, but that’s not why I’m embedding the video. In the process of answering the question, Graham tells a story about—well, listen for yourself. I’ve cued the video to begin at the question.