Monday, June 17, 2013

Tattoo story, Utter Brilliance


This story is so awesome and gives one of the most hitting-the-nail-on-the-head answers to anyone's prejudice against tattoos. 

“There is a short story about a man who worked as a palaeontologist or archaeologist and was leading a tour group through a museum as part of his summer job.

He had a large and prominent tattoo in a visible place, probably an arm or leg, and it was exposed. Not anything obscene or even particularly challenging. A person in the tour group, a middle aged woman, if memory serves, was persistently very snippy and dismissive of his lecture and when he finally confronted her about it in front of the group; she said she couldn’t take him seriously because he was tattooed.

He replied “this isn’t an ordinary tattoo, you see,” while slightly tilting the tattooed extremity, almost as if he expected it to beam a glint of light back at the viewer if cambered just right. “This tattoo is magic.” he said with a twinge of mysticism in his voice.

“If I hold it just right, it exposes the prejudice and ugliness of small and petty people.”