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Tattoos are a bit like dinner services because many people acquire them through imitation rather than purpose. Tattoo-havers often try to justify having a tattoo by claiming it has a personal meaning for them, but that's not the point, the point is that it shows others that you belong to an exclusive group. Why would you need to signal membership of a group to yourself? It doesn't make sense.
The popularisation of tattoos has diluted this signal to point that all it shows now is that you belong to the group of people who have tattoos. I suppose that is exclusive, but it's a bit meta.
It's a bit like wearing a football club strip. If you wear a football club strip on a football pitch it typically means you're on one of the teams. If you wear it off the pitch it means you admire the people who are on football teams. Getting selected to play for a team is exclusive and requires identifying yourself to the other members of the team, admiring the people who get selected isn't and doesn't.
All of these are symptomatic of the lack of meaningful personal identities in modern life. It wouldn't be surprising to find someone with tattoos, a football strip and who also owns a dinner service. It would be surprising if that person was in a football team and had the full complement of domestic staff to serve them dinner. A few days ago I watched a documentary about Japanese host clubs where a number of the hosts in the club wore crosses. Were they Christians? Given that ~1% of Japanese are Christian I suspect that 25% of the young fashion conscious men who make their living from selling champagne bottles to lonely women as a proxy for their personal attention weren't expressing solidarity with Jesus. I suspect they were constructing a fashion costume with shiny and vaguely exotic elements to catch the eyes of their customers. They were presenting an image without any substance.
Some of this is understandable. We all wear shoes, and so athletic trainers have become popular as much because they're comfortable and colourful as because they're associated with elite sportspeople. We all wear clothes, and so we might wear the denim jeans that were made for miners because hey, they're low maintenance and long-lasting. We all have to drive a car, so we get something a bit like a race car or an off road car even if we only drive at the limit between one paved car park and another. And yeah, we all have to eat our dinner off something too. But we don't have to mark our bodies. If you like to decorate your naked body you could use paint or henna. If you like art and design you could ask an artist to paint a fully framed canvas for you. If you like body mods and get a kick out of pain you could get metal teeth, shave your eyebrows off or just repeatedly scratch yourself with an empty tattoo gun. But people don't. They get tattoos because it's an image of authenticity, a commitment. But commitment to what? Everyone likes funny cartoons, everyone has lost someone close to them, everyone likes cool art pictures, everyone thinks the unusual is exotic, and everyone likes to think they're special. But those things aren't special, they're mundane. Being in a prison gang is special. Serving in the armed forces is special. Belonging to a Maori tribe is special. Being a Jew in a concentration camp is special. That's why their tattoos are predefined. You can't get a tattoo of Bart Simpson's butt cheeks on your belly button to show that you're a member of the Maori. You're getting a thick black spiral on your face, like it or lump it. Belonging can imply ownership as well as membership.
It's not about keeping the body in perfect shop condition. If I'd been in the navy for ten years I wouldn't object to having a tattoo to symbolise that status. I would object if I then saw someone else with naval tattoos, asked them when they served and they told me they just think the pictures are cool and that they're symbols for, like, navigating through life with confidence, and stuff. Keeping your possessions in unused condition is lame but it's not half as lame as pretending you possess something you don't. Saying if you can't destroy it you don't really own it is persuasive rhetoric but it shrinks next to the plainer statement that if it's not yours you don't own it.
You know what else women are famously keen on? Men in uniforms. Some like an officers' dress uniform are incidentally rather spiffing, but I'm not sure there's anything particularly flattering about a fireman's waterproofs and safety helmet. The appeal is what it represents: a man who has been endorsed as brave and capable. I don't get to dress up as a fireman and start bagging chicks, if I dress up as a fireman I'll get laughed at if I'm lucky to meet any chicks and more violently humiliated if I'm unlucky to meet any off duty firemen, who coincidentally don't wear their uniform out of hours. Worst case scenario the deception succeeds and I get sent up a 100ft ladder into a burning building where I then have to hope a real fireman comes and saves me.
Tattoos should symbolise being somebody, but more and more they symbolise being anybody with £50 and a free afternoon. If you're a Naz Reid fan you don't need to get a tattoo, you can get a selfie of you courtside enjoying that special moment after they win the match. Let Naz Reid wear the team strip.
Edit to add: Another aspect of traditional tattoo usage is that many of the people who used them either don't have much personal property beyond the clothes on their back for one reason or another, or are liable to find themselves in that situation unexpectedly. This touches on the "if you can't destroy it" aspect from the other side - if you can't deprive someone of it then it's something they'll have forever. In a funny way it circles around to being a different strategy for keeping their possessions in an unaltered condition.
This has always been my feeling on tattoos. I'm not against having them, but it feels like an act that should be tied towards a connection of personal gravity and importance. Not just 'lol Milhouse meme'
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