Rude Boys Ink.

Just read in the Guardian of a mother grieving over her son’s first tattoo. Irrational, prudish, pitiable old age angst? Isn’t it hip these days to get ink? Well probably not hip, that’s just showing my age, but it’s fashionable. In my teens the rare tattoos were on rude boys, aggressive underachievers, rockers with something to prove. The rest of us just wondered why. Each generation has its particular circumstance. My parents straddled two wars, WW1 and, as an unbelievably stupid teacher put it recently, World War Eleven. I was post war ‘never had it so good’, my sons are ‘good jobs pre 2008’ and the latest are lost. Not lost like misfits but lost from the home of a social role. They have drink, TV, iPads, iPhones, the debt from a pointless education and low paid part-time servitude. And they’re doing a good job of making the best of it. But what can you make from a ragbag of scraps? Like a batch of graduate astronauts on the day NASA pulled the plug on manned space flight they struggle to find a place. Somehow a tattoo is a part of the world under your skin, a bit of out there in here, an indelible bridge linking the two. Piercings become captured shrapnel from a skirmish with reality. Maybe that mother was in her eyes seeing her son becoming a rude boy underachiever, maybe his tattoo said, “Give my generation something to hope for.”