One of my favorite facts that I learned in researching tattoos for this column is the duality that they served during history. In Victorian-era England, tattoos were all the rage in the middle class but in Japan as far back as the seventh century, they were also used to mark criminals. Queen Victoria allegedly had a tattoo of a tiger fighting a python.

Nowadays we think of tattoos as a form of self-expression. When I see a marked-up person, I am less interested in the aesthetic as I am in the story behind why they decided to make their skin into a canvas. A few weeks ago at the Wild Onion, I met someone who used to be in the military who had a tattoo of a soldier on his forearm. “Who’s that?” I asked. “He was the leader of my squad. Great guy, great friend. Got killed in front me.”

I think that if you’re going to get something put on your body permanently it should mean something to you. Getting yourself marked up with miscellaneous tats doesn’t make sense to me, simply because a different tattoo idea might arise and having the real estate on your skin being filled up by something like a cowboy riding a dinosaur will only make it more difficult to fit. Your body is a temple, but I think that if something is meaningful to you, and wearing your heart on your sleeve (read as: arm) is how you want to adorn your temple, then go for it.

It’s not a landmark decision to get a tattoo, but it seems like a big decision nonetheless — which is why it got confusing for me when I started asking people about the reasons behind that choice. In my other job in food services, I asked a chef who was sporting a tattoo sleeve what it meant to him. He pulled up his shirt sleeve to show me his illustrated skin — which, I have to admit, looked pretty cool — and I wanted to know what a blue dragon head meant to him on a personal level.

“Oh, there are only like two or three tats on this arm that don’t really mean anything,” he said.

Well, then why do you want them on your skin?

Researching the history of tattoos was easy, but investigating them on personal level was tricky. I didn’t enjoy asking the semi-rude question, “Do you think you’ll regret it when you get older?” But the shrugs I got were perplexing.

Something that I didn’t hear in the tattoo documentaries I watched was how addicting it is to get them, something a few of my more illustrated friends experienced. They referenced facts that I was able to find cited in blogs, depicting how getting tattoos was kind of like going to the gym. Chances are that the first time you go on a treadmill, if you stay on for a while, you’re going to feel completely wiped out. Your body is engaged, and by the time you step off, you’re worn out.

In a study published in March of this year in the American Journal of Human Biology, Dr. Christopher Lynn, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama, noted that the body treats tattoos in much the same ways it does weights. Your body goes into defense mode and tries to fight the tattoo. Hence the fatigued feeling after a first tattoo.

“They don’t just hurt while you get the tattoo, but they can exhaust you,” Lynn said. “It’s easier to get sick. You can catch a cold because your defenses are lowered from the stress of getting a tattoo.”

But if you return to the gym and make it a habit, you’ll start getting stronger. Tattoos supposedly do the same for your immune system, as your body is literally always fighting your tattoo until it goes away, which is never. One of the chefs called that ‘stronger’ feeling addicting. Lynn research explains that a body that is tattooed repeatedly ratchets up the threshold that would necessitate an immunological response.

If you read through all of this and thought to yourself, “Yeah this doesn’t make me want to get a tattoo any more than before,” then that’s probably because it never jived with your personal taste, something you probably knew to begin with. Something that I looked for that I didn’t think I would find was some scientific reason or a single thread linking people who have tattoos. As far as I can tell, there isn’t one. Just as I couldn’t identify anything beyond personal taste that made people say no to tattoos. There are health risks, manifesting mainly in bad reactions that the skin might have to the ink. But I challenge you to find one person who lists this as their only reason for not getting a tattoo.

I didn’t come away from writing this with what I felt was a lot of concrete knowledge about this topic. The most informative literature I took in was the history of tattoos. The more personal side didn’t seem to have conclusions beyond that which you would expect. “Why do you like this?” “Oh, I just do.”

There are many decisions that go into getting a tattoo, and I don’t think we should view people any differently just because we greet their decision with incomprehension. Because if we want to really get to know people and read them like a book, some illustrations might be a great way to uncover who they are.

Jeffrey Langan can be reached at lang5466@stthomas.edu.