Tattoos And Piercings Essay

Tattoos and piercings were first adopted as a way for people to instantly identify each other within a group. They were used to mark out transgressors like criminals and slaves, as was historically done in China and many other places, or to provide instant identification of the members and non-members of a social group. While attitudes towards tattooing and piercing are fairly permissive in the United States, in Hong Kong acceptance is much less common, and participation in these practices is less likely to be widely and casually discussed.
Today, rather than a visible, easily understood marker of social status, tattooing and piercing center on the motivation and interests of an individual. Where society once claimed individuals for the group, now individuals make their own claims on the social landscape. By a wide margin, the most expressed sentiment behind a tattoo or piercing is as an outward representation of a person’s inner self, whether …show more content…
First and foremost, more common piercings are less valued than uncommon ones. Since many women, especially in the West where often parents will have their daughter’s earlobes pierced at a very young age, have the stereotypical single lower lobe piercing, it is neither special nor challenging. Facial piercings and belly button piercings are considered slightly daring but still common as piercings go. Piercing culture despises easily-obtained, point-and-click piercing guns and deems them inherently inferior to a professional piercer who uses expertise and skill (Larratt). Recently, ear piercings placed somewhere other than the lobe have become a more bold (and thus, high-status) statement, though the boldest is still “gauging” the earlobe by gradually introducing studs of larger and larger size (Pareek). The reason these rate higher is the risk involved, as well as the permanence. Earlobes aren’t elastic enough to shrink back once they’ve been stretched