On Tattoos

Branding of humans, as of livestock, is itself a useful practice.

Beef a la mode

Time was when the British tattoo served the useful function of distinguishing the criminal class from the rest of us. That more conscientious criminal, who existed from the beginning of the 19th century to the late 20th, even had the good will to explicitly classify his level of criminality by the ink which he committed to skin. Large, elaborate tattoos on his extremities signified a general malfeasance, though nothing that would place you in immediate danger. Facial tattooing represented something of a more serious order, but also that the individual had spent some time under rehabilitation, the tattoo serving as a sort of penance. Hidden tattoos, on the other hand, alluded to something much darker and discrete, and were even scarier in that they remained undiscovered until you had stripped the bugger’s clothes off.

But with the general cultural malaise that is downward aspiration making tattoos more popular amongst the lower middle classes, tattoos have ceased to serve their useful social function. Nowadays, a tattoo represents nothing more significant than artistic pretension or a dead relative, and a man with a full-sleeve tattoo is as likely to serve you a brioche bun in a café as he is to violate you in an alleyway.

More broadly speaking, the branding of humans, as of livestock, is itself a useful practice. Once upon a time in a land far away, a certain type of tattoo served the important function of distinguishing the marriageable women from those who were too young to enter into wedlock. These were the Koita women of Papa New Guinea who, at the age of sixteen, were tattooed with an inverse triangle around the chest to signal their entrance into the sexual market. Our own little island, though it resisted stamping its citizens with ink, has attempted a similar branding technique: Instead of tattooing the mature, it designates the immature with a school uniform. This inversion of the Koita people’s practice, distinguishing the young rather than the mature, and dressing them up in what has inevitably degenerated into a fetishist’s item, has, like a sacrificial pagan garb, had the disastrous effect of encouraging, rather than dissuading, the pederasts.

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