Exogenous Identity

When asked why she has never gotten a tattoo, my wife replies, “You ever seen a bumper sticker on a Ferrari?” She is joking, of course, but it is a hilarious one nonetheless.

You can’t walk a city block without seeing all sorts of skin graffiti covering arms, legs, backs and, increasingly, faces. This is a glaring difference from a couple decades ago when tattoos were generally associated with crime, poverty and lascivious living – symbols of orbiting in the outer ring of American society. What changed?

For sure, tattoos have been around for forever, the oldest human remains found have evidence of scarification. Associations with paganism and body dysmorphia ran aground of the American Puritan ideas of bodily purity, and since America was a Christian nation, tattoos were tabbooed.

Just a quick observation to leave with you, more of a curiosity really. The rise of tattooing in America seems to coincide with the societal disinheriting of Christianity. As you may have heard, Christianity surgically removed a heard of stone and provides a new identity in Christ which comes from the inside out. Abandoning Christ means the abandoning of identity. Identity being essential to humans, could the explosive practice of tattooing be the external application of identity?

Indeed, tattooing in Polynesians was precisely indicative of identity, particularly rank and ancestral bloodlines. In other parts of the world, the practice of marking the skin was used to identify slaves, sort of like how cattle are branded. Various tribes throughout the East used tattooing for similar purposes, all of it having to do in some way with identity.

So its an obvious question.

Now, whatever, I’m not against tattoos per se, I think they can be wicked rad – a phrase I am considering inking across my midriff. More just curious here if we are seeing the external symptoms of an internal thirst. When there is no endogenous identity which comes from Christ tattooing, if you will, a new identity on our hearts, and we begin feeling the nakedness of our being. We begin looking around for clues to what or who we are – a string of Norse runes, a silhouetted tree-line, the Japanese character for serenity we sincerely hope is the actual character for serenity. Is it just for fun or mere artistic need of the moment? Or could it be the amnesiac shuffling through of memories shrouded in mystery, that have the smell of something that seems like us – a permanent reminder to ourselves of the menagerie of curios of what we think we are?