First it's clothes.
Then tattoos. Then piercings. Eventually, we'll have done with the clothes altogether.
I’m not sure what the current trend for tattoos (and it has been cyclical since at least the time of King Harold II – the oaf with ‘England and Edith’ over his heart who lost the Battle of Hastings) goes to prove in a modern post-industrial society other than the fact that the people who choose to decorate themselves in such a fashion are just the latest prima facie examples of the regression of humankind and feel unable to embrace modes of communication such as words and/or actions. A tattoo is, kind of like (to drop into their argot for a second) Twitter and Facebook but forever innit… like.
The vast majority of the ovine multitude who shuffle past the bookies and Greggs to get to high street tattoo parlour and ask for ‘Something in Chinese or Japanese that says peace or whatever’ or ‘a portrait of my bird from this picture of her with her ex but can you leave him out?’ can justifiably be called vulnerable victims - but graduates, professional people and heiresses have no excuses.
Those who pay the tattoo artist du jour 750x the going rate to dab something discreet below their ankle, or who consider themselves profound and somehow superior to the common herd by having a quotation they could not be bothered to memorise on their back, are, with apologies to Oscar Wilde, merely the unspeakable in pursuit of the indelible.
To sport a tattoo, particularly a visible one, is to declare oneself on the side of the pagans and barbarians. It is, after all, an intrinsically short-sighted action.