Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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Notes -
People are dying to understand their life through symbols and condensed wisdom. Tattoos are the primitive form of this, the detailing of one’s ideals / status / life progress onto the body, as you always have the body with you and your body is always on display to others (tattoos in Europe are at least 6000 years old). This is probably why tattoos and astrology have much in common. Then there are other motives. It is a “gauntlet” experience, where the pain must be experienced to obtain the end reward, which is its own primitive ritual of costly signal. It is a costly signal of one’s own commitment to an identity, it is saying to oneself, “this is important and I commit to me”; human identity is fluid and capricious without identity-forming rituals, and tattooing takes the fluid and inscribes it permanently to the flesh. Lastly it allows one to imitate and conjoin to a celebrity or social scene, but that has more to do with instantiating the reasons above.
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