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7 min read

It's Time to End the Tattoo Epidemic

It's Time to End the Tattoo Epidemic
Photo by Taylor Brandon / Unsplash

The freakshow was meant to stay under the tent

By Thomas Crown III

There was a time, not long ago, when tattoos marked you as a very specific kind of person: a sailor, a gang member, a carnival act or maybe a butch lesbian with a penchant for switchblades. In the 1950s, ink was fringe. Taboo. Subcultural. The kind of thing you hid under sleeves, not flaunted on your collarbones. You got inked in a drunken haze in port or in prison with a sharpened guitar string. It wasn’t meant to be a lifestyle. It was a scar, a symbol of rebellion, marginalization or fraternity.

Fast forward to 2025, and ink is everywhere—from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s forearms to the assistant principal at your kid’s middle school. Your child’s kindergarten teacher has a chest piece. Your HR director has a forearm sleeve. The checkout guy at Whole Foods looks like he just left a biker rally. Somehow, the freak show became the new normal.

And it’s time to swing the pendulum back.

The Ghettoization of Society

The sudden ubiquity of skin doodles—by some estimates, nearly half of adults born between 1985 and 2000 are wearing subcutaneous permanent ink—represents not only a unique point in American cultural history but a hallmark of its cultural degeneracy.

Look around: Cookie Monster pajamas at Food Lion. Multicolored vape clouds outside QuikTrip. The slow-motion erosion of grammar, with Ebonics and TikTok aphorisms seeping into every tier of discourse—ong, no cap, fr fr. America in the 2020s resembles a landscape littered with low-impulse behaviors ("WORLDSTAR!"), ratchet affect (3 a.m. Waffle House energy) and performative dysfunction (street takeovers) where the highest status cultural icons—from Drake and Lil Wayne to Post Malone and Jelly Roll—have even lifted the taboo around face tattoos. Observe how Amber Rose—forehead tattoos and all—took the mic at the 2024 Republican National Convention and consider the implications.

In 2025, the normcore, buttoned-down aesthetic traditionalist finds no safe harbor. Even the political party once synonymous with Eisenhower stoicism now makes room for face tatts under its big tent—Amber Rose at the RNC says it all. When the SECDEF wears more ink than a ‘90s metal band, where does a young man turn for aesthetic guidance? Where are the clean-cut models of discipline and restraint?

The answer used to be: your doctor, your lawyer, your commanding officer, your librarian, your airline pilot.

Now? Good luck finding one without a sleeve peeking out under the uniform.

We have to go back.

The Santa Rosa, California of Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) feels like an alternate universe. Doors were left unlocked. The mailman knew your name. Teenagers sipped sodas at Woolworth’s counters in pressed slacks and saddle shoes. Mothers wore aprons not athleisure. Fathers read the evening paper instead of doomscrolling. You could walk downtown on a Saturday night and see clean-shaven young men in ties escorting girls in pleated skirts—not a parade of neck tattoos, vape pens and pitbull mixes in tow. It wasn’t perfect, but it was coherent. High-trust. Aesthetic. Civil. And it’s that coherence—the invisible web of manners, shared values, and visual standards—that held society together. Now it’s dissolved in a puddle of self-expression and dopamine loops.

All elegance, no ink.

The Health Cost Nobody Mentions

Let’s leave aesthetics aside for a moment and talk biochemistry. Tattoo ink doesn’t just sit there like a dorm-room poster—it migrates. Your immune system sees pigment the same way it sees asbestos or splinters: as a threat. Nanoparticles of ink get absorbed into the lymphatic system, where they’ve been found accumulating in nodes during autopsies. And yes, your lymph nodes are crucial—they’re the immune system’s staging ground. Now imagine them gunked up with “Live Laugh Love” rendered in cobalt blue.

A 2017 study published in Scientific Reports found that tattoo pigments not only travel through the body but remain embedded in lymphatic tissue, sometimes permanently.MOst alarmingly, many of these inks contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heavy metals like mercury and cadmium, and endocrine disruptors that wouldn’t even be allowed in your shampoo. Europe has already banned over 4,000 such substances under REACH regulations. In America, the FDA just got around to admitting tattoos might carry health risks—in 2022.

“This is an underappreciated area of toxicology,” said Dr. Andreas Luch, toxicologist at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment. “Tattoo inks are not inert. They are active chemical mixtures.” In other words, you’re not decorating your body—you’re dosing it.

So, no—this isn’t just art. It’s a slow-release chemical experiment, authorized by a stranger with a needle and immortalized in your lymphatic system.

Elegance Is the Counterculture Now

There remains an antidote to the gaudy entropy of our era, and it doesn’t involve laws, hashtags or culture-war sermons. It involves manners. Restraint. An aesthetic rooted in dignity rather than dysfunction. You can still catch glimpses of it: in the crisp lines of a freshly pressed shirt, in the quiet confidence of a man who wears a watch he inherited—not one targeted to him by an Instagram algorithm. It’s the Ralph Lauren ideal—seersucker, not slogans; linen, not lament.

This tradition wasn’t some oppressive WASP straitjacket. It was aspirational. It was the belief that self-respect radiates outward; that how you dress, speak and carry yourself isn’t a performance, but a quiet statement. It says: I have standards. I am not ruled by impulse. My presence will elevate—not degrade—the environment around me.

That spirit, once baked into American life, is now quietly subversive. In an age when the highest virtue is to be raw, visible and unfiltered, elegance has become an act of rebellion.

Tattoos didn’t go mainstream through liberation. They went mainstream when cultural guardrails collapsed. It wasn’t zoning laws that kept tattoo parlors on the edge of town—it was shame. The soft but powerful voice of collective disapproval. The same unspoken social pressure that once prevented people from showing up in public wearing pajamas has disappeared, replaced by indifference to forehead ink and face piercings at PTA meetings.

Cultural mores—not laws—once held the line.

You can still glimpse this lost America in faded photographs: clean neighborhoods, fathers mowing lawns in slacks, mothers collecting Tupperware orders in skirts, children riding bicycles unsupervised. No one had a neck tattoo. Even the neighborhood dogs weren’t mixed with pitbull. It wasn’t utopia, but it had coherence.

That coherence is gone. But it can be rebuilt.

GildedLore exists precisely for this reason—not to shame the inked masses, but to remind those still paying attention that taste, class and decorum are worth defending. That style matters. That elegance isn’t passé—it’s resistance. Tattoos aren’t just ink. They’re the visible residue of cultural collapse.

Elegance is the rebellion now.

Pick a side.

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Published by:

Thomas Crown III