A baby boomer looks at tattoos

Back in the '60s and early '70s, we baby boomers grew our hair to our shoulders, wore ripped jeans and open-toed sandals, and sat in full lotus position on the grass around some freak with a guitar who was playing and singing, often badly, "By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong."

That was cool!

But today, Generations X and Y have determined something else is cool.
Yep! Millennials think tattoos are cool. The only tattoo Baby Boomers ever thought was cool was Herve Villechaize from "Fantasy Island."

These days, tattoos of all shapes and sizes sprout everywhere about our incredulous heads. They're on movie and TV stars, younger office mates, dads and moms at the mall, and soon doubtless coming to doctors, lawyers and (biblical prohibition notwithstanding) even rabbis.

We boomers can only scratch our heads, lecture our children prophylactically, and have another drink.

Boomers connote tattoos with bikers, drunken sailors on shore leave, and guys with knocked-out teeth and greased-back hair that might have readily killed Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider if those two old rednecks in the pick-up trunk hadn't done it first. We grew up thinking tattoos were low-rent, anti-counter-culture, and totally at odds with whatever was natural and healthful for our bodies, like smoking pot.

Welcome to the "'90s

But then came the 1990s, a decade in which a long recessive gene began to assert itself like Joan Rivers on the red carpet at some third-rate awards show. Placing sharp vibrating needles into human flesh somehow came to be thought of not as a punishment for serious turpitude but as a joyful route to human disfigurement. The new era of the tattoo was born.

These days it's difficult to find an athlete or movie star who believes tabula rasa is an acceptable approach to one's epidermis. Younger folk today adorn their bodies with all manner of floral and faunal designs, calligraphically realized sayings and saws, and the inscribed names of beloveds, ex-beloveds and ex-ex-beloveds until one's thighs and buttocks resemble the innards of the Manhattan telephone book.

Angelina unclothed

The actress Angelina Jolie may be one of the world's most beautiful women, but her body's been marked up more thoroughly than the first draft of a term paper. With her lower back festooned with a crudely realized etching of a tiger evidently rejected from an early edition of Kipling's Jungle Book, Jolie achieves the remarkable feat of being more appealing to most Boomer guys with her clothing on rather than off.

Just another Generation Gap, you say? No different than when our parents gasped aloud that first Christmas break we came home with hair that covered our ears? Maybe, but just a few years later our parents were all growing their hair as best they could, wearing flared pants, and watching Dick Cavett.

I doubt that in a couple of years many boomers will be splashing into Plus 55 Water Aerobics with a gigantic pulsating heart etched in one's crotch.

I suppose the lesson of our era— the '60s and '70s— was that we're all different, and it's not our business to judge each other's tastes and preferences. So, I guess I'll just leave the millennials to their beloved tattoos. I hope they'll be happy travelling through life with bodies that are oddly reminiscent of walking Rorschach tests designed by an insane psychiatrist.

Me? I'll keep dreaming about that shoulder length hair I can never again re-grow.