The ghost tattoos that vanished from the streets

The tattoos that vanished from the streets — where are the fairies and the kanjis?

Have you noticed that certain tattoos have disappeared from the streets as if sucked into a black hole? That footballer's star on the elbow, the stoner fairy of the 90s, the Chinese kanji behind the ear, the tribal on the lower back... Suddenly, they're nowhere to be seen. It's not that everyone has had them removed with laser; it's as if an entire trend evaporated without a trace. Some analyses suggest the trend cycle is speeding up: what was a tribal marker yesterday is a walking meme today.

The catalogue of extinct tattoos

The list is long and varied. Starting with the fairies — including their stoner variant — that roamed festivals and craft fairs in the mid-to-late 90s. They were trinc by elbow stars, the hallmark of the early-2000s "metrosensmetro" trend popularised by figures like Rafa Sarracena. Then came the kanjis on the neck, the lower-back tribals (which prevented epidurals, according to one cutting remark), the Playboy bunny, fairies, moons with stars, barbed-wire armbands and dolphins on the ankle. Even Maori tattoos, which you saw everywhere just days ago, are now conspicuously absent. And let's not forget the botched portraits: one anecdote tells of a passer-by struggling to hold back laughter at one of those tattoos antiestéticatured on fail blogs.

Why do they vanish?

The theories range from the sociological to the conspiratorial. One sensible explanation: the ageing of those who wore them. The fairies belonged to thirty-somethings back then, who are now sixty-somethings and may be covering them up. Lower-back tribals are hidden under covered backs that no longer show a navel. Another school of thought points to retroactive embarrassment: those trends became so associated with an aesthetic now considered ridiculous that their owners choose to cover them with blackouts or laser. There's no shortage of people joking that "the masters of the Matrix" are removing tattooed NPCs from public view. What's certain is that the cycle is shortening: blackouts themselves, all the rage today, will probably be the next to fall into oblivion.

The future of 2024 tattoos

If we look at current trends — lion sleeves and clocks, commemorative vaccine tattoos, blackouts — many of them will meet the same fate. It's argued that in a few years nursing homes will be full of sagging tattoos, and their owners won't care. But the irony is that, like the fairies of the 90s, what seems edgy today will tomorrow be a filing-cabinet curiosity. Perhaps scarification or bionic implants will be the next frontier, as has already been predicted. In the end, the only tattoo that never goes out of style is the butterfly on women — and even that one isn't spared by the passage of time.

With all this in mind, the phenomenon of disappearing tattoos is nothing more than a mirror of our own transience. As in The Neverending Story, the Nothing advances at 1.5x estimulante ilegal. And there we are, with our ink, looking the other way.