Reasons for a Second Thought – Tattoos

Posted by Jack

Summary of an MSN story….

Trendy Tattoos

I’d love to tell you to jump right in if you’re ready for your first tattoo, but if you are currently job hunting, take a serious pause. Research shows that having visible tattoos makes is harder to get hired. “Visible tattoos” refers to tattoos on the face, neck, forearms, hands, and lower legs.

A negative bias against tattoos seems to affect every business sector. Restaurant managers prefer hiring servers without visible tattoos while sales managers worry that hiring sales people with tattoos will affect sales.

A bad tattoo artist could leave you with a sloppy tattoo at best, serious infection at worst. “It leaves people exposed to contracting HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C,” Heath Technician Matt Kachel explained to Baraboo. “These are diseases a person may contract and not know about it for a long time. It can lead to outbreaks, and that’s not something that we’d like to see.” Don’t worry about asking too many questions. Do your homework so you can feel good about this experience.

“As more people continue to get tattoos, the more people are having tattoos removed,” Dr. Geronemus explained. “With recent advancements in skin care technology such as PicoSure, tattoo removal has become significantly easier. For example, in the past the colors blue and green have been problematic in removing from the skin. However, today these colors have become the easiest to remove.”

A study in Managing Service Quality found that if you have any visible tattoos, you’re probably going to be judged for them at some point or another. Participants in the study were asked to look at pictures of people with and without tattoos, then make assumptions about them. Study participants believed the tattoos were unprofessional. Older participants even went so far as to say that the tattooed workers seemed less intelligent and less honest than the non-tattooed workers.

According to a recent study, having a tattoo affects the way your body sweats. That ink on your skin can actually block sweat, so choose where to place it very wisely. Our bodies need to sweat to avoid overheating, so it’s especially important to never block your sweat glands with a tattoo.  “We also found the sodium in sweat was more concentrated when released from tattooed skin,”

If you have had skin cancer or if there is a strong history in your family, keep walking the next time you pass a tattoo parlor. While there is not a direct link between tattoos and skin cancer, there is enough concerning information about a possible connection to make you think twice.  “The process of tattooing involves the integration of metallic salts and organic dyes into the dermal layer of the skin,” Plastic Surgeon Cormac Joyce told Time. Breaking into the skin and causing this inflammation could lead to “malignant transformation.” Dr. Joyce believes that while tattoos do not cause skin cancer, they could put those already at risk in grave danger.

“Patients run the risk for an immediate or delayed infection, poor healing, poor scarring, localized or systemic reaction to the ink/dye, and there have also been reported cases of infectious disease transmission from dirty needles and instruments. While some of these risks can be treated with antibiotics, many of these risks pose long-term consequences.”

When Kaley Cuoco and now ex-husband Ryan Sweeting met, they married within a year and celebrated that date with a tattoo. Unfortunately, the marriage ended almost as quickly as it started, and Cuoco was stuck with the tattoo on her upper back. She shared her journey of covering it with her fans on Instagram. Rather than remove the wedding date tattoo, Cuoco chose to cover it with an insect, writing, “the deep, meaningful, larger than life meaning behind this beautiful piece of ink, is….. It covered the last one.”

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16 Responses to Reasons for a Second Thought – Tattoos

  1. J. Soden says:

    Maybe it’s just my generation, but I’ve never seen the need to painfully puncture your body with ink that couldn’t be removed without enduring even more pain. And that doesn’t count the possibility of infection.
    Peer pressure? If so, perhaps you should evaluate your “friends.”

  2. Pie Guevara says:

    I could never understand the lure of body graffiti. Nevertheless I have contemplated taking tattooing to a bold new level — internal organ tattoos.

    As such, I have been considering getting my liver tattooed with the Wild Turkey logo using radium ink. This way I could sport my tattoo on a fluoroscope or with an x-ray negative. Such tattoos could become a big hit at airport terminals.

    What do you think, Jack? 😀

    • RHT447 says:

      Hah! It would be worth the price of admission to go through TSA at the airport with a liver that blinks “Epstein didn’t kill himself”.

      • Pie Guevara says:

        Now you are one upping me, just like More Common Sense did with his prediction (see below).

        Imagine a going viral collection of smart phone YouTube vids of people with internal organ tattoos walking through airport terminal fluoroscopes.

        How about artistic internal organ tattoos of portraits depicting entertainment stars like “Liverace” or “Margot Kidney”?

  3. More Common Sense says:

    I place tattoos in the same category as graffiti and bumper stickers. The aesthetics of anything is greatly diminished with the application of any of these three abominations.

    It might be because I am 65 that I especially abhor tattoos. When I was growing up only sailors, Polynesian men, and criminals had tattoos. For some reason it was acceptable for Polynesian men and sailors to have tattoos, but it was still undesireable.

    I especially don’t understand young women with tattoos. There is nothing at all feminine about a tattoo. It makes me sad to see an attractive young woman marked up as many are today. Why would anyone put art on their body that no one with any taste at all wouldn’t hang on a wall?

    Please understand, this is just my opinion. Even though I am dead-set against tattoos and would offer that opinion to anyone that asks, I understand that tattoos are a personal decision and I only have the right to approve or disapprove of a tattoo if I am the potential “canvas”. People that want tattoos should be able to get tattoos. I would hope that there would be little more transparency in the contents of the ink so that the only thing a recipient of a tattoo was receiving was bad art and not a life threatening chemical.

    Wouldn’t it be nice if someday someone came up with a tattoo ink that was safe and permanent if left alone but easily erasable though some painless procedure. That way a bad decision made while succumbing to peer pressure or while on a drinking binge could easily be eliminated and, in the future, some poor young child won’t have to explain to their playground friends why Mommy looks like a bad comic book.

    • Pie Guevara says:

      I have been considering getting a tattoo in invisible ink.

      • More Common Sense says:

        Pie, I’ll make a prediction. Within several years someone will come up with a micro led that can be injected into the body. These leds will have the same abilities as smart bulbs do now such that they will be able to turn on and off, change color, blink, run in sequence. They will be able to be externally charged and will be controllable with your smart phone. People with these tattoos will look like human Las Vegas casino signs. I’m not advocating this. It is just a logical progression and application of technology. One positive aspect of this is they can be turned off. Hmmmmmm, I’ll bet they will be targets for hacking!

  4. Peggy says:

    During my biker-chick days I had two yellow roses tattooed on the back of my shoulder. They were for my sons, one who had passed away. I was mindful to put them where they wouldn’t show wearing work clothes.

    While as union president for a college district during the sexual harassment awareness period, I had to inform an employee he had to wear long sleeve shirts to cover the naked lady he’d had tattooed on during his Navy days.

    • Chris says:

      That’s very sweet, Peggy. I don’t have any tattoos and don’t really want any, but my wife has some, and each has a sentimental meaning behind it. It took me a while to get used to since I grew up in a household that strongly discouraged tattoos, but now I love them.

  5. cherokee jack says:

    When I was 18 I got some tattoos for the same reason I enlisted in the Airborne during wartime. Because my brain hadn’t evolved beyond Hollywood inspired daydreams. I was also smoking Camels, drinking cheap booze from the bottle, getting into “what are you looking at?” brawls and engaging in backseat-of-the-Chevy wrestling matches.

    For all those who say we should lower the voting age even more, try to remember what your political IQ was at 17 or 18. I would have voted for Donald Duck if he’d been on the ballot. Maybe he was. I wasn’t paying that much attention.

    • Pie Guevara says:

      When I was in my mid 30’s I was in downtown Lafayette on a Saturday afternoon shopping for groceries at the Safeway. When done I walked across the street and stopped in for a beer at the Round Up Saloon.

      The Round Up is Laffing-yet’s last surviving original dive bar, established in 1935. At the time when I lived there it was owned by a founding Laffing-yet family whose daughter I went to high school with.

      To give you a sense of the exotic atmosphere, you can smell the stench of urine coming from the men’s room the moment you walk through the front door.

      Anyway, the place was empty. I ordered a beer and the bartender/owner returned to the back room to do the books and do some ordering. (He knew I wasn’t the sort to help myself to the tap without calling out and trusted me.)

      So, I was happily sitting at the bar all alone sipping my beer, reading about Joe Montana in the San Francisco Chronicle green sheet (which hadn’t been printed on green newspaper for at least a decade) and relaxing mellow on a hot afternoon. It was a pleasant ten minutes and when I was about half way through my beer a young man walked in, strode straight to the stool right next to me and sat down. I, naturally, glanced at him.

      Instantly he glared at me and scowled, “What are YOU looking at!”

      Needless to say, this really pissed me off. Here I was having a pleasant drink and read and suddenly this fool bursts in and shoots it all to hell. Kinda like when a Chris Souza comment pops up on the blog waiting for approval. I went Clint Eastwood on the son of a b****. (“High Plains Drifter”, first bar scene.)

      Well, sort of.

      I glared back and replied in a calm low voice, “That’s a rhetorical question.” (Yes, I actually did say that. 😀 I doubt he even knew the meaning of the word “rhetorical.”)

      I continued without pause (this all happened in moments, no doubt far less than fifteen seconds if not ten) and with the same low, slow voice said…

      “I am looking at nothing.” (Meaning him.) “You don’t give a damn what I’m looking at and I will look at any goddamn thing I f***ing well please.”

      Keeping my eye on him I chugged down the remainder of my beer, slammed the glass down on the bar, leaned over and said in a menacing near whisper, “All I wanted was a cold beer on a hot afternoon and I get this s***? Go f***, yourself.” I then exploded, violently stood up, accidentally knocked over my bar stool and walked out while he sat there stunned.

      Thank goodness he didn’t follow me.

  6. Joe says:

    Great interview with Peter Schiff about how gooberment screws everything up with its bail outs. And the moral hazard of Demorats cancelling all the student debt.

    https://youtu.be/rIO5xIDb_r0?t=2744

    The interview should automatically tart about 44:45, but if you can listen to the whole thing.

  7. Post Scripts says:

    I graduated high school at 17 and was working in supermarket at the same time. Then I enrolled in a JC and continued working part-time, so I never really gave tattoos much of a thought. Later on, when I was on board a navy ship in 1966 the guys who had tattoos were not great roll models, mostly alcoholics or thugs. Time passed, then I was into law enforcement and tats were used to ID criminals and dead bodies, so that had no great appeal either. Then while a detective, I was working dope and did some undercover stuff. once again tats were use to identify people, only this time it was used by dope dealers. I didn’t want any drug dealers to see police tattoo, like “LAPD – 1975.” That would have been too hard to explain, especially while the bad guys had a gun to my head. Yeah, that happened to me too, but not over a tattoo, it was over a drug deal and I talked my way out of being shot and still made the dope buy. It was a good day.

    By the time tattoos were a fashion thing (20 years later) and everybody had to have one, I was too old and set in my ways. Just seemed like a dumb idea, even if it might make me look cool or artsy. Having said that, my grandson got a tattoo on his calf, but from 6 feet away it looks like a large bruise. But, a lot of tattoos look like skin injuries from a distance. Two years later he got another tat on his arm, a sunken pirate ship and skull. Of course he was never a pirate and nobody in the family were pirates, so the symbolism was lost on me. Guess he just liked the Under Sea – Sponge Bob theme?

    • Joe says:

      I knew I guy who wanted to get a tattoo. That’s was back in the ancient days when people had tattoos like “Mother.” And that’s what he wanted but he kept putting it off. So on the day he goes to have it done he changes his mind half way through so he walked out of the tattoo parlor with “Moth” tattooed on his arm. Nice, huh? Have know idea what happened to him but I’m sure he tried to get it removed.

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