Tattoos: a prejudice that refuses to fade

Disgust at tattoos: a prejudice that doesn't age well

On the Spanish TV show 'Juan y Medio', a woman in her seventies with a fresh tattoo and a nose piercing becomes the target of mockery. To some, she is a freak show; to others, an exercise in freedom. The question circulating on social media is blunt: what is more disgusting than seeing a tattooed person?

The stigma that never heals

Tattoos went from being a mark of the marginalized to a mass phenomenon, yet the rejection persists. In opinion pieces, insults mix with aesthetic arguments: the bald man with a tattooed head, the grandfather with a dragon that will end up looking like a run-over lizard, the piercings that come along like an inseparable pack.

Neobarbarians versus classical sophistication

Some see the rise of tattoos as a cultural regression. According to this reading, the Greco-Roman legacy of thought and elegance is being abandoned in favor of primitivism and crudeness. That current could be summed up as the battle of the 'neobarbarians' against the classical canon, in which the media play a decisive role by imposing, so they say, ugliness.

The health taboo, with no scientific basis

Another line goes further and links ink to illnesses that have no basis in reality. Comparisons that border on the absurd reveal a prejudice that is hard to dismantle: the tattooed person as a bearer of a stigma that recalls old times.

The paradox is that those who are scandalized today by a tattooed grandmother belong to the generation that normalized piercings. The disgust, more than an aesthetic judgment, is a lament for a world they no longer recognize. And while some deliberate over whether ink ages badly, others are already covering their first gray hairs with new designs.