I’ve wondered what the appeal is for people to have ink permanently infused with their skin or having their body pierced in uncommon areas.  Looking around the internet we see a variety of reasons, tattoos of family members, military service, some personal meaning, prison affiliation, just for fun, or a drunken escapade which ends up with a lifelong regret.  I can well understand tattoos, which commemorate some significant event in the person’s life, as being, at least to that particular person, important.  But, I believe getting a tattoo all boils down to one thing; Having a tattoo aid’s a person’s belief in their own uniqueness.  That somehow, with a tattoo or unique piercing they are unlike everyone else on the face of the earth.

A former co-worker got a tattoo on her ankle some twenty years ago because no one else did.  She bemoaned the fact that everyone else is doing it now.  Suddenly, the valuation that she placed upon that object dwindled quicker than Bear Stearns.  She showed me, with some residual pride, her green tattoo of some symbol I couldn’t make out.  Over the years the tattoo had changed, making it look less of a symbol and more like a chunk of dried snot.  From the ‘now normal’ to the ridiculous, prisoners in American jails are getting the whites of their eyes tattooed, because… “I can guarantee no one else looks like me…”

Where could this obsession to appear different/unique/special come from?  A drive to be unique is not new, though in ages past it was likelier easier.  Historically in any small town everyone was unique in their own way because they lived in amongst such a small sample of human variation.  And because travel was so difficult the chances that a person would find someone eerily similar was close to nil.  (For the purpose of this essay I’d like to omit areas of extreme inbreeding because they obviously don’t care about how they look or else they’d have tried to bring in new genes).   Even names could be unique.  At least first names (the Old Order Mennonites only have one last name; Martin).   Imagine then the stark difference someone in a small town would make if they had a tattoo of a dead skunk on their face.
  
Tattoos are old.  From the Maori to the Inuit tattoos served an important purpose.  Rites of passage and rituals often accompanied the tattooing process to the point where it could be linked to religious experiences.  For the Maori it was a time consuming and painful process.  Due to the tools (primitive in nature) and the taboos surrounding a tattoo getting a tattoo was a far more involved and meaningful event for ancient Maoris than their modern day equivalent.

Looking around Kitchener Ontario’s downtown core we see quite a few tattoo shops.  In fact, along Kitchener’s King Street in a mere three kilometer corridor there are no less than nine tattoo shops.  Nine!  Kitchener has a population of 200,000 and can somehow support these nine shops.  In Waterloo there are 5, 3 basically on the same block! One merely books an appointment; half hour later walks out with a tattoo… Just in time to get that starbucks coffee before everyone else.

Proliferation of tattoo shops is just another symptom of our desire to be unique.  In this regard having tattoos is akin to owning various toys from the latest cutting edge electronics to the most stylish clothing.  Affluence equals special; Tattoo equals special.

So where did this obsession with body art come from?  Indirectly from the rise of social media.  Never before have we humans been more connected to each other (for the sake of this argument I will imply that social media does connect humans to each other more than before, but I will not comment on the long term feasibility of said social media connections).  With Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and the myriad of other sites I can now get information to the second of when my friends have bowel movements and where exactly they are having them (if we extrapolate to the point of idiocy people alerting others of when they are having a coffee to important bodily functions).

Surfing the web, to use an antiquated phrase, I can, in an instant, see that my name is not unique.  There are quite a few others with my first and last name combo.  Going further one can see that his/her thoughts are not unique at all.  I thought to use the term Vampirate, thinking I had come up with a unique term.  There’s an actual series of books/comics with that as the title.  How vampirates could survive traveling the oceans while having to hide below decks during the day escapes me.  Unless they are sparkling modern day vampirates.

With the vast amount of information in the oceans of the internet can spark a sobering thought, if one only takes enough time to think between the constant friend updates.   That thought is, in my thoughts, in my name, in my actions I am not unique.  There are others who think, look, act as I do.  There are others who drive, play, read, or use the same thing or things I do.  There are others who are likely writing diatribes similar to the one you are reading right now.  (Though to be fair those essays likely will not have the sentence - Rumpleforeskin monsters eat banana’d  rock cows).

Sensory overload muddles our thoughts.  We now have constant stream of information and, for the sake of not missing anything important, we review it all. We see others whom we feel are unique and therefore force us to act, to make a mark on this world.  I wish I could say I am immune to this process, but I am not.
The superficiality of social media with everyones’ likes displayed so prominently makes social media connections disingenuous.  Seeing that a friend likes a certain band means nothing, because thousands of others also like said band.  And, one has barely registered that like before one has already gone on to the next like update.  In a face to face moment, of actual spatial and temporal proximity, we can ask our friend why they like that band.  The like becomes real, becomes meaningful, becomes something to which we can relate.

But, all that means nothing because it is the appearance of uniqueness that is important.  Hence, the flourishing of tattoo shops in Kitchener Ontario, hence the consumer mentality.  Because people are spending more time in front of the computer and television, not less, superficial attitudes begin to overwrite and rewrite our social brains.  The explosion of reality tv with mock drama bears this out.  It is meaningless, but yet we watch it, hoping not to miss it.  It is easy to become lost, adrift in the sea of content.

And therein lies the rub, because we are unique.  I can guarantee that if I listed my name and my ten closest friends (Ok 2 closest friends, I’m not that popular) there would likely not be anyone that could match it.  If I take my wife and children’s names, ages, personalities there would be no one else to match it… My experiences, my interests, my duties as a friend, employee, mentor (I know I’m stretching it there) husband, father all make me gloriously, most post-modernly, unique.  I need no tattoo to prove it, I need no mansion to guarantee it.  I am.

Out.

It is all a matter of perspective, because clearly loads and loads of people also strive to be similar... take organized religion (or any other group of "individuals") who strive to hold on to some "constant" that ties them all together.  This is often carried out so devoutly that they often ignore the fact that their individual interpretations may be vastly different.

We are a strange breed, we humans... if we ever figure out we actually want, I wonder what will be next?

I think that's precisely why people strive to be different, because there is a long history groupings like religion etc.  But where that is a group affiliation and has long affected human history now it's more about 'me' or 'I'. Post-modernism spells that out where everyone has his/her own unique perspective.  Take a look at censuses where suddenly there are not enough questions on ethnicity because people are looking to be unique and because they feel they are unique that the current choices in the census do not reflect their ethnicity.

The more we humans try to classify things the more we find out the world is a continuum.