Customizing the Body (PDF file) - Print My Tattoo

186 Epilogue 2008
street-shop social control covered in Chapters 3 and 4 of Customizing
the Body. He focuses on the moral and ethical instruction
that tattoo artists undergo as they come to see themselves as
artists and as they seek validation for those claims among their
peers in the broader world of professional tattooing. Part of this
process involves a form of retroactive apprenticeship that many
artists seek after they have bypassed the formal apprenticeship
system. Realizing that their autodidactic instruction in tattooing
has left out the history and ethics of the trade, they seek instruction
from those who are more established and who have access to
the institutional memory that is such an important part of the
social networks that comprise the broader professional world of
tattooing.
In his most explicit departure from Customizing the Body, Vail’s
(1999a) comparison of tattoo collectors and opera fans shows how
members of art worlds use the time they have spent developing
and refining their taste in art as a resource in convincing others
of the legitimacy of their claims to membership in elite art worlds.
In focusing on the time it takes to learn about and consume art,
and the often strenuous physical demands of consuming art, Vail
shows how art-world participants justify their claims to sophisticated,
and sometimes explicitly superior, taste.
CONCLUSION
Predicting the future of any social phenomenon is always a hazardous
endeavor. However, it is not unreasonable to expect that,
for a time, tattooing will continue to expand since more people are
now wearing or choosing to acquire tattoos and, as emphasized in
Chapter 2, the choice to get tattooed typically is prompted by the
fact that a person one knows is tattooed. In short, the more
people who are tattooed, the more “unmarked” people have contact
with friends and acquaintances who are tattooed and the
more likely they themselves are to move along the path to being
tattooed. There are also more tattoo shops available to both serious
and novice tattooees. The increased opportunity to acquire a
tattoo is also likely help to prolong tattooing’s popularity.
But, like all fads, tattooing will probably decline as a widespread
decorative practice. Because a certain, relatively small,
proportion of those who get tattooed move on to eventually