These people are awfully quiet.

My blog post entitled "Why You Should Not Get a Tattoo" is in Google's top ten hits. About three hundred people a day read this post, or at least look at it. There is one comment under that post, and that was left in 2008, by someone I know. 

I just re-read it, and the truth is, though I wrote it partially in jest, it contains some good advice. 

I do wonder why no one ever leaves a comment. 

Image note: Not a tattoo, but it would be clever (and not recommended).

Recently I noted that a number of tattooed people have posted comments on Facebook criticizing plastic surgery because the people who had it done weren't happy with themselves as they were "naturally." Tattooing and plastic surgery aren't so different. If people simply wanted to "wear art," they'd don interesting clothes and hang pictures from their necks. People want to change the way they look in drastic, permanent ways, and though not many think of tattoos as doing that, that is indeed what they do. 

When I first started tattooing, I met a tattoo artist who had inked his left calf entirely black. A year later, the person he had apprenticed with had done the same thing to his left forearm. They both had the same goal, which was simply to see how evenly they could do black work with a four flat needle. I have always wanted to do an entire "body part" one color, but I never had any takers.