22 March 2013

Tattoos

 

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Whether an excrescence of ridiculous tattoos
disgracing what charmingly passes for youth’s
cream or that they’re volunteers being lauded
for doing amazing things during the floods – it
bothers me they needed to defend themselves
making grandiose statements in the first place.

I’ll agree the lasses are supplicants wearing a
cosmetic version of permanence – their male
companion is a hardened dissociate however,
with indelibly real whorls barely concealed on
chest, neck, shoulders and back; there is no
aesthetic relief for his enduring affliction

Its solidarity, a case of we volunteered as we
were, nothing fanciful or glorious in that, and
he is one of us, seems different but it is only
a surface thing; we can say with conviction
we know how danger doesn’t discriminate or
tribalise on the basis of gaudy tattoos.
© 20 February 2013, I. D. Carswell

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