What were they thinking?

We all make mistakes...

Temporary mistakes can last a long time.  Read any tabloid and you'll see mistakes immortalized on film.   Sometimes celebrities try to pass off a few threads as clothing.  Or maybe they settle for passing off tattered couture or clash-tastic outfits as fashion.  Fodder for jest archived forevermore on the internet.  These days, bad choices have staying power.

There is a more permanent variety of bad choices.  I'm talking about tattoos.  Tattoos can be great.  Or they can be awful.  You never really know until the ink settles.  There's a lot of superstition around tattoos.  For example, it's bad luck to get a name tattoo (Mom notwithstanding).  This superstition serves a purpose.  One should probably think long and hard before doing that.

By the same token, it might be a bad idea to let your cousin experiment with his new tattoo machine.  You might want a swallow, but end up with a mottled roach.  

Thankfully, if you can afford it, there is laser removal.  You'll always wear the scar, but at least there's an option when your waterfall tattoo begins to collapse.

Mollifying the mistakes of the past is a good thing.  We need to allow them to drift away into memory.  Really large, uncoverable tattoos represent a life choice.  Sometimes you get the Sistine Chapel.  Sometimes you get a Ouija board.  Not hyperbole.  

Somewhere out there a walking, talking portal is just waiting to be unlocked.  The implications make my head hurt.  

Maybe it won't work.  Or maybe it will.  Perhaps it was just an uninformed, irresponsible (unethical, even?) choice.  Consider the time and money it took to get that done.  It would have been cheaper to bling out a sign.Evil.

But with a pirate's chest worth of treasure even that could be undone.  Maybe.

However, treasure can't undo everything, which brings me to memorial tattoos.  Or catnip for shadow people.  Never heard of them? Basically, it is a new trend of having human remains mixed into tattoo ink.  Sound gruesome? I thought so.  

Apparently, cremated ashes are produced by either a slow burn or a long burn.  A slow burn produces ash with chunks of bone.  Long burns produce a quality of calcified ash similar to cigarette ash.   The ash can then can be re-heated and mixed with ink by a tattoo artist.  

This gives me the creeps, but it gets worse.  Cremated ash contains calcium and other impurities.  From what I understand, the rejection rates for regular ink tattoos are pretty low.  But the rejection rates for memorial tattoos are potentially much higher.  Worse yet, there is a risk that human remains may contain traces from other cremated ashes.  Yikes!

And if that is not grim enough, I do not know if they can be removed.  It is an emergent trend.  The long-term issues are unknown.  The exact rates of infection are undetermined.  How do you remove pure death permanently imprinted? I imagine the epidermis would absorb additional calcium deposits if it did not reject them outright.  But who knows? I hope somewhere a brilliant doctor will pioneer the removal procedure. 

How is it that we have gone so far astray? How could such a trend gain footing? Sometimes I wonder if our compulsion for instant gratification has not spawned a pathological inability to let go.  Have we not been told that the spiritual has real life implications?  

For a little perspective, consider that the ancient Romans would not bury their dead within the city walls.  Instead, graves lined the Via Appia.  The dead were inhumed (buried) or cremated.  Cremated remains did not reside within dwellings either.  They were entombed.  It was also customary to place Charon's obol on the mouth of the deceased.  A final gift to pay the boatman for safe passage to the underworld.  

The wealthy did it differently.  Noble families would have wax death masks made of the deceased.  This was also common practice among the ancient Egyptians and Etruscans.  These death masks would be placed in the atrium (sanctuary) of the home.  And a candle would illuminate the mask at night.  While macabre, this practice was the nearest thing to a photograph in the ancient world.  It was a safe and honorable rememberance.

Tattooing was also a common practice in the ancient world, but memorial tattoos would have been considered barbaric.  Have we actually embraced a practice that the ancient Romans would have rejected as savage? It makes you think.

I'm not saying that we should emulate ancient Roman society.  It was a dirty, vicious, hard world.  And Rome was rife with curses and black magic.  But their civilization lasted a thousand years.  They did some things right.

George Iles said, "Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark." I hope this trend fades into shadow.  Death is a part of life.  Our relationship with death is a broken thing.  Despite what we may believe, we have not abandoned ourselves to whimsical phantasmagoria.  Our cavalier attitudes are rapidly devolving into the grotesque.  I hope we re-think these issues before more damage is done.  The soul dies a slow death.

In memoriam for innocence lost.