Douche Bag Tattoos
So, I’m at a diner with my best friend. He’s on the phone with his womanly-lady friend, and I’m looking up wrestling articles instead of writing a paper.
I’m productive like that.
Anyway, some how the conversation across the booth turned to what makes a good tattoo, and he says, “I don’t know, just don’t get a douche bag tattoo.” He knows what he meant, I know what he meant, you probably know what I meant, but she didn’t. So he passed the phone to me.
Douche bag tattoos are a genre. Lame, poorly done, poorly planned, and flat out awful ink constitutes a douche bag tattoo. A douche bag probably has a few douche bag tattoos, but someone with a douche bag tattoo isn’t necessarily a douche. It’s a one way street.
Douche bag tattoos are like douche bags, a majority of non-douches you can spot a douche from a mile away. All you have to do is see most d-bag tattoos and you can recognize it instantly, but that’s a little difficult to explain to anyone who doesn’t understand the nuances of the douche bag stereotype.
So I started by rattling off the douche bag tattoos of my lifetime: tribal, barbwire, nautical stars, tramp stamps, cleavage flowers, pistols on the pelvis, brass knuckles, spider webs, that Celtic stuff that looks like an Affliction t-shirt threw up, and song lyrics from bands with less than three albums.
The theme there has nothing to do with the actual tattoo itself. Just because one person got a tribal design on their upper back doesn’t instantly make the tribal design a douchey tattoo. Hell, just because a hundred or a thousand people get tribal work doesn’t make it douchey. Ink starts flirting with the douche line when it’s an attempt to jump onto a trend. “All my favorite athletes have a Celtic cross, I want one!”; “All the kids at the show have chest pieces, I want one!”; “Popeye has an anchor, I want one!”
Two people can have the exact same tattoo, but only one might be a douche bag tattoo.
All that said, my opinion on d-bag ink goes out the window after tattoo number four or five. If you’re covered in random ink, no one’s gonna gave if you got a padlock for the sake of getting a pad lock.
I’d rather someone get the lamest tattoo in the world because they wanted to get it for no reason at all than someone get that tattoo because it’s the cool thing to do.
Just my thoughts, I’m a dude with an opinion.
