Tattoos in Australia: A special report into the fashion trend that lasts forever - Part II
IN the second part of our special series on tattoo culture, we explore the link between ink and sex, and confront that question that accompanies many first tattoos - what will your parents think?
HAD she gone ahead with it, Carly Sanders’ half-joking idea for an art exhibition could well have been called Blokes Making Dicks of Themselves. It would have been a collection of photographs of penises, all of them sent to the tattoo studio proprietor by men turned on by the art that covers much of her body.
“For about two years, clients would track me down through Facebook and I would just get a random dick pic,” she said. “Not even a hi, how are you; people would just send me photos of their penis, which was quite confronting.
“I just found the whole thing funny, I wasn’t too offended by it, but I thought it was ‘this is how you look to us, so this is how we’re going to respond’. The more tattooed I am, the more of that kind of response I’m getting from the world, which is a strange thing.”
What is it about tattoos and sex? In the first part in this series on today’s tattoo culture, we looked at how society’s attitudes to ink have changed in recent times, how they are no longer seen as a sure sign of rebellion or mischief, why they aren’t the employment blocker they used to be, and why young women in particular are embracing elaborate body art as permanent fashion. Whether perceptions of tattoos as some form of sexual signal have changed is less clear, but research suggests they still have this power. They may even be sexier now than ever before.
When French researchers put young women, some with tattoos and some without, into identical bikinis, sent them to a beach and observed them from a distance, they found that men were more than twice as likely to approach the women with ink and attempt to strike up conversations. As part of the same study, the researchers also interviewed hundreds of men and found they were 20 per cent more likely to think they’d be successful in getting a date with a tattooed woman, and were 28 per cent more likely to expect that woman would have sex on a first date.
Meanwhile, separate studies have failed to find any compelling evidence that people with tattoos, men or women, are more sexually active and/or promiscuous than those with none.
Indeed Carly, who runs the Wolf & Wren studio at St Peters, is in a long-term, monogamous relationship and describes herself a “a bit of a nanna”, but she has become used to the impact a lot of ink can have on at least some men.
“I noticed the relationship to how many tattoos I had and the level of male interest I would get and they way that it has changed (since she became tattooed), so I think it does still have that bad-girl look about it,” she said.
Tattoos on men also seem to have a powerful sexual impact and the “bad boy” thing also comes up repeatedly in research, whether its conducted by scientists or men’s magazines (which seem forever fond of the topic and that may well say something).
Few will be surprised to find that tattooed men are seen as more masculine and dominant, by both women and men, and studies also suggest that men with ink are seen by women to be less promising as a committed life partner and parent.
Of course, as with women, this is books being judged on the traditional “bad” messages projected by their covers, but tattoos may also be sending a deeper mating message, one of good health and desirable genes.
Even today, the making of a tattoo is painful and great care must be taken to prevent infection, which at least can be countered with modern medicine if it does take hold. For thousands of years, however, a tattoo could be a dangerous thing and heavily tattooed people, who in most eras were almost always men, had to be tough, fit and healthy just to survive their art.
The theory is that this sent, and possibly still sends, a message to women that these men will father tough, fit and healthy offspring. Scientists have also theorised that male tattoos send a competition message to inkless men, specifically that there is an alpha male in the game and they might as well leave all the women to him.
WHAT WILL MUM AND DAD THINK?
“It was my worst nightmare.”
Pasqualina Georgiou remembers when daughter Micaela got her first tattoo, and Micaela remembers that “Mum didn’t talk to me for two weeks”.
These days, though, Mum has her own ink.
Pasqualina lifts her hair to show the subtle leopard-skin design on her neck, in a spot where she can show it off if she wants, or conceal it simply by wearing her hair down.
But the Adelaide fashion designer, now a grandmother, remembers when her daughter got her first tattoo, and then more tattoos, and how difficult that time was.
“It started off with a beautiful butterfly and I thought ok, I can deal with that, she said,” but Micaela, now an artist, moved to the UK and would come home with more ink on every visit.
“At the airport, every time she would come I would just see the tattoos,” Pasqualina said.
“It was very confronting and it took a lot of years for me to see her rather than the tattoos .... a mother never really thinks that her daughter is going to be covered in tattoos and it’s not something that was normal in our life expectations.
“But now that there’s so many beautiful tattoos I think oh my god, why did I worry so much about it.”
Thinking back, though, she sees that she was more troubled at the time by being unable to understand the reasons behind her daughter’s new passion.
“I believed Michaela was a very beautiful, beautiful girl. I was more aware of why she was doing it than the pieces themselves. My interpretation was that as a teenager... in her own way she wanted to be anonymous, but it was strange because she was really doing the opposite.”
“Now I’m older and wiser and I know that this is part of their growth, their journey, and my journey is not the same as anybody else’s.”
By the time Micaela got married in front of wedding guests including “our big Italian family”, mum was right on side.
“I really had to tell my family: There’s going to be a lot of young people who are fully tattooed. You are not allowed to stare.”
Parental shock and horror at their children’s tattoos is almost a cliche, but perhaps even this is changing and that might be because so many parents are inked themselves.
George Georgiou, Pasqualina’s husband, Micaela’s father and also a fashion designer (the couple have the Alexis George and Lexi labels) was, according to his daughter, “more chilled out”, and today he also has an arm tattoo dedicated to his late brother, but he admits he is still surprised when young women come in for fittings of elegant gowns, and reveal their tattoos.
He has no objections, he’s just “still a bit shocked sometimes ... just not expecting it on some girls”.
As someone who has spent his life in fashion, though, he just sees the phenomenon as just another version of every modern generation’s apparent need to express itself.
“When we were teenagers, our way of expressing ourselves was what we wore. Only sailors got tattoos,” he said.
In a survey of more than 1000 Australians last year, research firm McCrindle discovered that of the tattooed parents it talked to, 17 per cent would discourage or strongly discourage their adult children from getting a tattoo, but almost a third said they would encourage them to get one and just over half would neither encourage nor discourage them if asked for advice.
Micaela’s heavily tattooed best friends, music-industry promoter Kylie Lockyer and famous
London tattoo artist Nikole Lowe, are both very comfortable in their artistic skins but, like her, they started out in their teens and admit that, for all their youthful rebellion, they were both worried about what their parents would think.
Kylie, who got her first ink at 15, “hid them from my parents for a while”.
“My first one was in a lounge room when I was in the country,” she said, adding that on coming home, she would dress to hide the art from family.
Nikole did her own first tattoo at 14 “just with a compass and ink”, and then was presented with a problem. Her sister had already been tattooed and “my parents spent quite a lot of money getting her tattoos removed. I didn’t really want to upset them”.
She wouldn’t fully explore her passion for body art until she moved to the UK, way out of site.
“When I had my whole leg done and I went home for my brother’s wedding, (mum) made me wear a long skirt... but I wore one with a split in it. She wouldn’t talk to me, either, and she wouldn’t look at me, but now she loves it.” she said.
And there’s lasting proof of that. Last year, Nikole proudly announced on Instagram that she “just got tattooed by my mum and dad”. Their signatures, with XX kisses, are on her thigh.
THIS STORY IS THE SECOND IN A SERIES ON TATTOO CULTURE. TO SEE PART I, CLICK HERE
COMING THIS SUNDAY: PART III