"tattoos aren't just for sailors and whores anymore"

Okay, the other thing I am obsessed with lately are the tattooed sideshow-ladies. "A Life of Her Own Choosing" is a neat article on one such woman.

Somebody special sent me to a good site full of vintage photos of mostly heavily tattooed people. The women intrigue me the most:

Nay Nay was telling me the other day about a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. For the paper, she was to define what is beautiful and what is ugly within her culture. We were in the middle of the shampoo aisle at the time that we were having this conversation, and I wonder if the other shoppers even knew or cared that we were having a life crisis situation when my sister looked at me wide eyed and asked in true horror, "Shit, what is my culture?" I didn't know what to say. This was a heavy moment. What is our culture, really?

This feeling of displacement reminds me again and again of the tattooed ladies. They defied cultural beauty standards, setting themselves apart, permanently. They traveled. They lived on the fringes. They weren't afraid of pain. They wrote their own stories through body art and a way of life.

Now everybody and their mother has a tattoo--including mine!