My succulent paid subs—you have a belated edition of SubscribeStar Saturday coming your way imminently (coming 10 AM EST today, Monday, 24 August 2026). In the meantime, here’s a quick musing for the plebes. —TPP

I’m just old enough to remember a time when tattoos were taboo and trashy. The only people that had tattoos were the following:

• Military veterans who had seen real combat
• Motorcycle gang members
• Tramps (remember the early 2000s “tramp stamp” lower back tattoo?)
• Really rough lower-class types and/or people who were trying to emulate that style

Only the first two are acceptable. If you were at Iwo Jima, yeah, you’ve earned a tattoo of an angry fish or whatever. I remember in college (the early 2000s) the third—the “tramp stamp”—became more common among some women, but it was something that instantly marked a woman as having poor taste and impulse control. The male equivalent was that “tribal armband” thing.

Otherwise, tattoos were basically a form of self-medication for various forms of mental illness, like smoking cigarettes. Often, the overlap between the two—tattoos and tobacco consumption—were very high.

Now, everyone has them (well, not me). People reportedly get “addicted” to getting them (a common refrain I’ve heard from tattoo aficionados is that, once you get one, you want another).

I suspect their ubiquity now is indicative of our society’s general inability to think beyond immediate here and now. That used only be the purview of the fourth type on that list—those poor souls who are so diminished intellectually or developmentally or socially that they never learned—or were incapable of learning—impulse control. Now, it seems as those a vanishingly small number of people can think long-term.

Surely social media plays a role—as it always does—in both popularizing tattoos (“everyone” has one, so I should, too!) and in reducing our overall long-term planning abilities. Do I really want a tattoo of a flower that represents my deceased grandmother on my boob when I’m seventy? I don’t think people think it through.

I also suspect tattoos are a reflection of society’s increased nihilism. If everything is meaningless, then why bother with Beauty? Let’s just make ourselves and everything else ugly (ironically, I think some people get tattoos in an attempt to overcome their physical deficiencies; it’s rare—or used to be rare—for a gorgeous person to be covered in tattoos, but I’ve seen plenty of amorphous land whales with the physique of the Pokémon Ditto covered in tats and sporting bright blue hair). As always, nihilism is a blight on all things Pure and Good and True—and Beautiful.

To be clear, get your tattoo; it’s no skin (no pun intended) off my lower back. But I’ll judge you. You shouldn’t care about that, but if you do, it proves to me that you’re only getting the tattoo because you’re seeking external validation, so much so that some chubby raconteur on the Internet is getting a rise out of you.

God Gave you beautiful skin (ladies, listen up in particular). Don’t sully it with a spinning wheel that’s a metaphor for time or how your Mimi used to sew you a sweater. Mimi would rather her little apple dumpling have smooth, beautiful, unadorned skin, not a sick-green outline of a dove that starts to look like an amorphous blob after ten years.

Think ahead. Don’t be a putz. Tattoos are for military veterans and bikers, not corporate drones sending e-mails for a living.