imagine tat!

A friend in my age range - let's not get too specific and just say somewhere between age 49 and 51 - just got a major tattoo.

I was at one of my 14-year-old's AAU basketball games a couple Saturday's ago and the mom of one of the players from the other team had also recently got 'tatted' up; a shoulder to wrist floral arrangement on both arms. Naive as I am, I kept thinking she had some sort of arm-nylons on under her sleeveless t-shirt. That's what I explained to Amy who elbowed me because she thought I was looking over there too much.

Of course head for the local high school or even middle school and you'll see an alarming number of young people with low ride jeans, high rise shirts, and lots of tattooed skin. And then there's the girls.

The old adage claimed that "clothes make the man," which seems way too superficial, just as getting worked up about tattoos seems judgmental, turning a matter of taste into a moral issue. Right?

Along those lines my grandpa insisted you could tell everything you needed to know about a potential job candidate from his shoes: "you don't have to be rich to have your shoes shined." He obviously hadn't anticipated casual Fridays and Ecco comfort shoes.

But back to tattoos. Just in case you were wondering -

* 15% of Americans have been tattooed - about 40 million people
* 38% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 40 have been tattooed
* Democrats(18%) are more tattooed than Republicans (14%) and Independents (12%)
* Geographically the West (20%) outpaces the East (14%), Midwest (14%), and South (15%) among adults with tattoos
* About 20% of those who have been tattooed regret it, with the number one cause of regret being the person's name in the tattoo (16%); 11% admit "it was stupid"
* Of those with tattoos 26% feel more attractive, while 5% feel more intelligent; 29% feel more rebellious and 57% of those without a tattoo agree that those with tattoos look more rebellious
* On google searches, more people are interested in Angelina's tattoos than any other celebrity

I think the numbers speak for themselves. Besides proving that Democrats have a higher propensity toward rebelliousness, that Brad may or may not find tattoos attractive depending on which news source you take most seriously in the grocery store checkout line, and that the 5% of those who are tattooed may not be smart enough to know that ink on skin didn't make them more intelligent, the conclusion really is quite evident and irrefutable ... kids, the answer is still no ... under no circumstance are you to get a tattoo!

Not even if you want a heart with Mom and Dad inside it.