What Tattoos Say About the Present
When I was young, sailors got drunk and got tattoos. It was a ritual of rough edges—done on shore leave in foreign ports, half for memory, half for bravado. A skull, an anchor, a pin-up girl. Sometimes you got your girlfriend’s name in shaky cursive on your forearm. Usually, it outlasted the relationship. Tattoos were impulsive, intimate, and almost always a little bit stupid—which made them honest.
I came of age in the hippie era. It wasn’t cool to be rich. It was cooler to be in a rock band. Drugs like LSD weren’t about partying—they were about expanding your consciousness. People chased the inner light, not clout. The mysteries of the East—India, ancient China, meditation, Buddhism—weren’t aesthetic props. They were portals. Even the Beatles dropped acid, went to Rishikesh, and studied transcendental meditation with a guru.
We were looking inward.
The people of suburbia were the “plastic people.” That was the insult. Plastic meant fake, conformist, soulless. You didn’t want to be like them.
The hero of the movie wasn’t a startup founder. He was a guy who walked away from Wall Street for a braless girl in jeans and a tie-dyed shirt. She had a copy of Siddhartha in her backpack and no plan except to get to Big Sur. That was the dream. The dream wasn’t to win the game. It was to leave the game entirely. The movies Woodstock and Carnal Knowledge embodied it.
I remember being at a bus stop in Arlington, Massachusetts, waiting for the 77 to Harvard Square—a hip place back then. A VW microbus pulled up. The guy inside yelled, “We’re going to Watkins Glen!” It was another Woodstock, another muddy miracle. A bunch of high school kids at the stop just got in. No hesitation. They chased something bigger. That was the era: don’t ask permission—just go.
The Vietnam War was still going on. The draft hung over everything like smoke. Boys were sent to fight and die in jungles they couldn’t find on a map. The rebellion wasn’t symbolic. It was existential. Distrust in government wasn’t a meme—it was reality. The cops cracked heads, the suburbs numbed souls, and the system felt like a trap with nice curtains.
The civil rights movement was in full swing. Court-ordered busing had just begun—and Boston, supposedly liberal, resisted harder than much of the South. Racism wasn’t regional; it was national. Everything was under pressure. Culture, class, race, politics—it was all breaking open. That’s what made it electric.
On weekends, we went to the Boston Tea Party—a club where you could see B.B. King or Clapton play to 250 people. No one was filming. No one was tweeting. You were just there. It was messy, it was real, it was alive.
Even after college, I had a room across from Harvard Square for sixty bucks a month. You could get by, float a little, follow a thread of thought without starving. You could read a book about Taoism or practice tai chi in the park instead of climbing a corporate ladder. You could tune in, turn on, and drop out without a trust fund. That door was open.
Fast forward to 2025 and it’s all flipped. Everything is on the outside now. The soul-searching has turned into skin-signaling. Tattoos are the most obvious embodiment of that.
Where we once looked inward to find meaning, we now ink it onto our bodies, hoping it’ll stick. Identity is a visual project. Pain, politics, spirituality—all converted into design. And in an age where meaning is hard to come by, tattoos offer the illusion of it.
People only measure your worth in relation to your stock portfolio, your car, your square footage, your 401(k). Worth isn’t intrinsic anymore—it’s appraised. Lifestyle has replaced life.
So the tattoo becomes part of the inventory. A symbol in your branding suite. A way to say “I’ve suffered,” “I’m spiritual,” “I belong,” or “I resist”—without having to risk very much at all.
You can’t escape it, even if you want to. The whole world is on a spreadsheet. Every escape route has been bought, optimized, and priced. If there’s a cheap place to live, someone already found it, turned it into content, and started raising the rent.
If you don’t want to play the game, you’ll have nowhere to live. No health insurance. You’ll be working three jobs for peanuts, dodging bills and burnout while the algorithm tallies your productivity. Opting out isn’t just difficult—it’s punished.
Even the last refuge—the commune—is gone. If you bought land and pitched tents today, the health department would shut it down for violations. Improper plumbing, or just too many people from different families living together. The dream of dropping out has been zoned out of existence.
Even the music feels shallow now—external, curated, self-conscious. But maybe it’s not really about the music anymore. It’s about the image of music. The visual production. The vibe, the video, the “aesthetic.” Everything’s built to be seen, clipped, posted. The sound is secondary. It’s all surface—and surfaces don’t break you open. They reflect you back at yourself, filtered and branded.
Now, you can spend some money and get a little worth inked into your body—no soul-searching required. Meaning comes prepackaged in Sanskrit quotes and minimalist birds. You don’t have to wrestle with the question. You can just buy the answer.