Tattoos are stained from an inky substance, etched into flesh, virtually permanent, yet superficial. Soldiers, sailors and vagrants acquire tattoos for a sense of permanency. Anchors or ribbons boasting 'Mother' are particularly ironic. Both are mooring and both are ink committed to flesh.
Compare a tattoo, which is painful to apply and takes a significant amount of time, with memory. Retrospection, too, may be painful but while memory
does not take a long time to apply may encompass quite a bit of span?
Memory is neither strictly personal, chosen as a tattoo might be, nor necessarily aesthetic. The pain of memory suggests it is as subjective as application of a tattoo. Memory, unlike a tattoo, is not superficial.
Whatever we remember we remember because of its importance, or its trace along with something important.
The assertion that memory is not superficial may strike one as odd inasmuch as memory has all the characteristics of superficiality. Memory is
fleeting. Memories may be modified. They are largely hidden whereas tattoos are exposed. Nevertheless, tattoos are largely the result of a
personal preference. We choose a tattoo whereas a memory more often than not seems to choose us.
Although Jimmy Buffet suggested that tattoos are chosen when in a state of inebriation, they are certainly the portraits of an artists' ability. Memory is not the result of any one person's skill but the consequence of receiving and assessing (and possibly projecting) experience.
The primary reason memory is not superficial is precisely because it is not strictly personal. When a human being dies, for example, not only memory but also, to some extent, the memories of the person survive. Wakes and family gatherings after a funeral consist largely of sharing memories the living have of the deceased. The living also repeat and spread memories that the dearly departed told while alive. While these are largely reports
of what the deceased did while alive, they are also statements of stories the departed told. Upon death, on the other hand, a tattoo is simply irrelevant.
Whereas tattoos are always superficial while alive and irrelevant when dead, memories are always available in some form of another. They may continually be appraised, researched, repeated, and act as contributory to future experiences. Tattoos are not even particularly self-expressive.
Memories express the self as well as the surrounding selves. A person entering a tattoo parlor, even if sober, may or may not be in search of a particular design. In either case, her or his eventual choice is limited to the skills of the artist. An anchor, a ship, a floral design, a skull and crossbones, a spider's web which winds from the elbow to the biceps and wrist are experiences the subject undergoes but not particularly expressive. Nor is it particular persuasive to regard the spider's web as evocative.
The subject, especially is drunk, may simply have thought the catalog etchings of the artist's repertoire were interesting. A tattoo is rarely, then, eloquent, much less self-expressive. This is not to say a tattoo may not be ostentatious. They can. However, the spider web as little denotes an evil personality as the floral design snuggling the word 'mother' expresses love. It is the design which is important; a pattern as at home on a flimsy piece of paper, wadded and throws away as poor art, as on the flesh. Indeed, the tattoo generally begins as a decoration on a certificate. Even the epidermis is an afterthought.
The only thing the tattoo expresses is the otherwise irrelevant fact that the subject is willing to undergo a certain amount of pain.
