The Psychology and Mythology of Tattoos
The men entered the locker room strutting, as if they were returning from the wars. One man took off his shirt and revealed on his back a tattoo of a blood-red sun rising up through his nipples and setting somewhere under his chin. Another manly soul walked past me swinging a large right arm which displayed a tattoo of medieval iconography, with snakes, demons and other dark spirits taking over his biceps, triceps and his radiating shoulder muscles.
I watched this parade of muscle and mythology waltz in front of the locker room mirrors, a hint of deltoid here, a latissimus dorsi there, with the image maker reflecting back on the delirious patrons the total joy in watching themselves become art. I understood the subjects were in training, learning to add a wink and a nod to their Michelangelo of muscles that soon would be on full display in that theater of dreams when they abandon their toilet for the communal adulation they will receive on the gym floor.
I follow this martial army of painted souls into the open where they join decorated women with whom they share secret handshakes, elbow rubs and an occasional unrehearsed fist bump. I walk among this painted lot and quickly realized that I was on a world tour, with the Andes on some arms and legs and Everest rising up from one’s man’s broad back to a point under his hairline, home to the mountain peak. Soon I was in the Amazon jungle with vines rising out of athletic shoes and up well-formed thighs and past tight waists that had found a home in the crunch machine. A few courageous men and women gave their backs, chests and necks to all the luscious greenery that flowed up from the forest floor.
But all was not bombast and full canvas art. I saw women with hummingbirds tattooed on ear lobes and necks. Punctuation marks seemed to be in vogue for both sexes. I saw semicolons, questions marks and the subject/predicate grammar line on arms, wrists and hands. Clocks inside of roses inside of clocks seemed to be on parade. I had read that tattoos of the solar systems were very popular with people who wanted others people to look at their chests. But I looked and I looked without success, deciding I should be pleased to have noticed a discarded Jupiter drifting like a lonely planet toward a woman’s neck. I didn’t ask.
I recall my late father-in-law, a Marine who served in World War II in the Pacific, sporting a “Semper Fi” tattoo on his forearm. As I watched Walt grow old, I also watched the tattoo fade. But it was always there as memory and sign. It spoke to me about the Battle of Guadalcanal, a campaign Walt said nothing about.
I served in the Navy for four years and saw my share of tattoos which seemed understated and somewhat apologetic. The Navy frowned on huge anchors rising out of the chest and going to war with the throat. Tattoos mainly featured hearts, names of girlfriends and the feminine ship. I served on an ammunition ship and can’t recall any tattoos that pictured the bombs that we were dropping on North Vietnam.
Forty years ago the tattoo was an emblem of the bad boy, the outsider, the biker and the sailor. Today the tattoo occupies an important place in consumer culture. Researchers at the University of Arkansas traced this shift in their paper: “The Tattoo Renaissance: An Ethnographic Account of Symbolic Human Behavior.” The researchers explored the psychological implications of these changes, examining the tattoo’s relation to the sense of self and what this says about risk-taking, addiction and satisfaction.
The professors note that there is a long history of people using body decoration for tribal purposes, emblems of accomplishment, or a testimony to group membership. In a complex, ever-changing society with interest and pressure groups the “tattoo becomes one more way of reassuring the ego under pressure.” The researchers point out that though tattoos are rich in personal meaning, they can also have important mythic, cultural and religious meanings. The Christian cross suggests suffering, transformation and redemption through that mythic cycle.
Though there is sometimes risk-taking and regret among the purchasers of tattoos, the researchers found considerable satisfaction. Many purchasers of tattoos reported that they felt their bodies had been transformed and in some respects made new or reborn. In this sense the tattoo was not just a sign or a symbol, a piece of art on a limb. It became an essential part of the body and an expression and extension of self. A tattoo can take on an archetype feel and have symbolic import. Some people interviewed said that they wanted their body to be an aesthetic, a walking art form. Others considered tattoos an expression of a public persona, an embodiment of a personal narrative. People in this study referred to getting a tattoo as something spiritual or even magical which could deliver them from the mundane world of everyday. For them, tattoos can both extend and simulate the self.
To understand the pervasiveness of the tattoo culture one has to go no farther than Pinterest or Tumblr where the range of art, from ampersands to battleships is staggering. At my local gym, on these social media sites and in the research literature I frequently encountered tattoos with a mandala symbol. This is exactly the symbol Jung dreamed, drew and embraced when he descended into his unconscious, a journey captured in the “Red Book.”
Jung considered the mandala an ancient symbol, representing psychological formations, transformation and eternal re-creation. He saw the mandala as a symbol of self; it was a circular pattern that contained design motifs which were universal in nature, across cultures and time. The mandala represented the wholeness of personality.
In his “Symbols of Transformation” Jung wrote about how modern men and women were losing connection with their unconscious selves, primitive energies and the symbolic life represented in dreams and daydreams. He proposed the practice of active imagination, a process by which we make dream imagery a part of our daily life. In a sense this was “dreaming the dream forward” and getting strength from these psychic energies.
I have this fantasy about Jung visiting a tattoo parlor and immediately getting into a lively conversation with the staff about all those symbols of the unconscious decorating the walls and the bodies of those who walk through the place, looking for art, looking for self.
