Many people think that having tattoos and piercings diminish your appearance to the public eye. Yet, they are right and wrong. By tattooing your canvassed skin you’re creating a person which you’re in love with. You don’t have to ask people for their opinion, it’s your body, and you should be able to do whatever you want with it. People may not realize it at the time but they’re hypocritical, unless they were goody-two-shoes when they were younger. They don’t realize that being different was all they wanted when they knew that breaking the rules was something they could easily get away with, whether that’s cheating on tests, doing drugs, or skipping class. But inking your skin, piercing through its defense or getting implants is not against the rules, so what can it break, besides your wallet?
The movies, Flesh and Blood, Modify, and Tattoo Ink explain why body modification is so important to the human population. If we didn’t have body modification, we’d all practically be twins, and nobody wants to be a twin. Without body modification you can’t express who you are. Just by wearing the clothes you do makes you modified. People don’t think it, but it’s true. In some way everyone is modified. By cutting your hair a certain way, and wearing makeup you are modifying the body.
People often confuse body modification with body mutilation; though it’s not even close to the same thing. Modification is the changing of one’s appearance, to which mutilation is the harming of one’s self. Yet, some people get pleasure from the pain of piercings and tattoos, it has to do with the fact of change. Body mutilation, you change the feelings inside, which no one can see. Things such as cutting and burning are mutilation. Body modification such as tattoos, piercings, and implants are not a mutilation.
People don’t realize that they can’t express or show anything of their lives if they just put on a pair of jeans and walk out the door. By tattooing their skin, piercing anything, implanting gel implants into their skin, they are showing people they’re more than just a regular person who goes to work every day. Their showing creativity of their mind, and keeping it close. Tattoos can represent anything; fear, dreams, creativity, members of their family, religious views, stress. Also, sometimes people get tattoos because they’re stress and by putting it on their skin, they release it. The pain also is a stress release.
Though tattoos and piercings can lessen the chance of getting a job, people need to realize that self-expression is so much more important. Some companies limit the self-expressional policy though. They usually say that no tattoos or piercings are allowed to be visible while the employees are on clock. Women can have a minimum of zero and maximum of one earring in each ear during the work hours, but in which they have to be a certain size. Companies use this policy to lessen “trigger points” costumers get when they are upset about the image given off by employees.
So it’s your choice, expressed or repressed? Should you be able to full blow the policies and be who you are when you’re working, or should you hide behind drapes? People should not tell people who they have to pretend to be and who they have to set an image for. Self-expression is a self-expression, people can’t stop you, and I realize that people want to meet you half way, but if you’re a person telling someone they can’t do something because of other people, they don’t realize what they would feel if they were the person saying you can’t do this, you can’t do that. They would be pretty upset. People just need to understand that self-expression is more than an image; it’s a way of life. So what I’m trying to get at is that people with piercings, tattoos, and implants are not bad people, they’re normal people who just want to be different.
Citations:
Downey, Beth Ann. “Tattoos and Piercings Are More Popular than Ever, but What Do Employers Think about Them?” AltoonaMirror.com – Altoona, PA | News, Sports, Jobs, Community Information – The Altoona Mirror. Web. 27 Sept. 2011. <http://www.altoonamirror.com/page/content.detail/id/553398/Tattoos-and-piercings-are-more-popular-than-ever–but-what-do-employers-think-about-them-.html?nav=738>.