Sitting at home, I obsessed over the show “16 and Pregnant” on MTV and fol­lowed the weekly jour­ney of four of the girls in the spin-off of the show “Teen Mom.”

I watched the young moth­ers deal with dat­ing, their babies’ fathers, day care, receiv­ing gov­ern­ment assis­tance and one mother’s jour­ney of cop­ing with adop­tion. (more…)

Tattoos are hardly just ink, they are an artform

Ink is all over cam­pus, but some peo­ple are so opposed to tattoos.

Tattoos are viewed by some as being dis­re­spect­ful to your body. Others might go so far as to call it a form of self-mutilation. Others see it as an art form, and an addict­ing one at that.

People have been mark­ing their bod­ies with tat­toos since the dawn of time. The word itself is derived from “tatu,” which means to mark.

Exposure to tat­toos usu­ally occurs at a young age. I was in ele­men­tary school when I heard the term scar­i­fi­ca­tion, as a young girl. I put into my mind that scar­i­fi­ca­tion is just another way of say­ing tattoo.

American tat­toos were orig­i­nally made by hand; how­ever, in 1891 the first elec­tric tat­too machine was issued a patent from the United States Patent Office to Samuel O’Reily(tattooarchive.com). He began a par­lor in New York City.

By the mid 1990s, accord­ing to U.S. News & World Report, tat­too­ing had become one of America’s fastest grow­ing cat­e­gories of retail busi­ness. There are now an esti­mated 15,000 tat­too stu­dios in oper­a­tion. The once-taboo prac­tice of body mark­ing con­tin­ued to gain broader accep­tance and pop­u­lar­ity through­out main­stream society.

People have now finally started appre­ci­at­ing the artis­tic merit of tat­too­ing. Tattoos are fre­quently used to express per­sonal and reli­gious beliefs. Tats are now seen as a part of fash­ion and our gen­er­a­tion, in par­tic­u­lar, has gone ga-ga over the art form.

Watch your favorite sit­com and you may notice a tat­too on the lead star. Watch the real life expres­sion of the art on LA Ink and Miami Ink. You have many actors and actress such as Ben Afleck and Angelina Jolie. Rappers such as Lil Wayne and Trina, and Basketball Players such as Lebron James and Allen Iverson are cov­ered with Tattoos.

This art form has come so far that even gov­ern­ment agen­cies rec­og­nize it, as both an art form and a pro­fes­sion. Tattoo-related art­work is the sub­ject of museum, gallery and edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tion art shows across the United States.

I have five tat­toos myself. I received my first tat­too my junior year here in Big Rapids. The sec­ond through the fifth, and soon to be sixth, can be attrib­uted to my tat­too artist in Detroit.

Getting over my fear of the pain of tat­too­ing has allowed me to be able to express myself through my tat­toos. All of my tat­toos are spe­cial to me and have dou­ble or triple meanings.

Tattooing ulti­mately is just another form of self-expression. The rea­sons behind get­ting “tat­ted up” are often the same as those that would lead some­one to color his or her hair, have a unique style of dress, or even get a cer­tain Facebook appli­ca­tion. A tat­too is a mark­ing on your body that gives you the free­dom to decide what, where, or how you want to express words, pic­tures, or sym­bols that mean some­thing to you.

With the com­bi­na­tion of tech­nol­ogy, his­tor­i­cal aware­ness and artis­tic abil­ity the art of tat­too­ing has been taken to new heights never imag­ined before. Tattoo art is grow­ing so fast today that there is hardly any coun­try untouched by this form of art. Although there are still some peo­ple who con­sider tat­toos to be wrong, I imag­ine that their opin­ion is one that our gen­er­a­tion, and those to come, does not share.