I'm not much in favor of tattoos. It's probably something that got instilled in me during my upbringing, and all the reasoning I have behind that comes out of the irrational distaste that I got from growing up as an only moderately rebellious kid in the Midwest. Which is to say, I don't think I have a well-reasoned argument against tattoos, only that I don't really care for them, and, if pressed, I could say something about how foolish it is to put something permanently on your body when you're probably going to change your mind about fashion and hairstyles and everything else about you. Also something about how I think skin is beautiful on its own, and it should just be left on its own.
I'm not against you having a tattoo, of course. I just know...well, okay, here. Let's go the backdoor on this next story. Like many geeks, I grew up having a certain weakness for funny t-shirts. A certain type of guy, who doesn't know much about fashion, does at least recognize that t-shirts are a way to signal to others what type of people we are. We may not know how to do it with a bandanna, a pair of appropriately expensive jeans, and the right type of shoes, but we know that if we walk around wearing a shirt that says, "Science! It just works, bitches!" people will know what type of person we are. And for a long time, as a geek, you want people to know that you're the type of person who wears a shirt exhorting science, or Far Side cartoons, or whatever it is.
Eventually, though, some of us realize that it's just kind of weird to go around with a joke billboard on your chest all the time. You meet new people, and at some point early in the meeting, they look at your chest, and go "heh," and the conversation moves on...but your shirt doesn't. Essentially, you're standing around, making the same joke over and over and over again for 18 hours straight. And then, sometime in the next couple of weeks, you're going to do it all over again.
And so that's a tattoo to me. A statement you never stop making.
As I said, I don't have a very sophisticated rationale for why I don't like tattoos.
Anyway, this entire thing was sparked by Richard Stevens (the cartoonist of
Diesel Sweeties),
tweeting that "
There's only two tattoos I could imagine having. three blank comic panels on my arm to draw in or a ruler on my finger." Those both seem relatively utilitarian type tattoos, neither of which really fits my previously articulated tattoo cosmology. It also got me thinking about the various types of running joke tattoos to put on one's junk*, like a nickname that expands into a full name when one's junk is fully erect, or a ruler, or something along those lines.
* By "junk" I of course mean "cock", and by "one's" I mean "a guy who isn't me."
And then I realized there needed to be a new maxim. Thinking upon the old maxim: "a man with one clock knows the time, while a man with two clocks is never sure," I submit this new saying for your approval:
A man with a ruler tattooed onto his junk is never sure about the length of anything.
