You can blame David Beckham for a lot of things.
You can blame him for extending the limited shelf life of Victoria beyond all fathomable lengths. You can blame him for crimes against haircuts. You can blame him for making high-pitched squeaky voices - the type that are only audible to dogs - acceptable in public.
Burett WatchesBut the most pernicious, woeful legacy that Beckham and his overpaid, undereducated, overindulged footballer pals will leave us with is the tattoo. It was footballers who made the tattoo fashionable - and it is footballers who are responsible for turning us into a nation of ink addicts.
That's right, thanks to Golden Balls and his rapidly disappearing surface area, we'll soon be a nation of needledecorated Victorian circus freaks.
It wasn't too long ago that the only people who had tattoos were sailors, paras, ex-convicts and New Zealand Maoris.
Nothing wrong with any of those, of course. Having a tattoo back then was about being part of a gang.
It was a rites of passage symbol; a sign of fitting in; of signing up forever to something with meaning; of something greater than yourself. Longines Replica Unless, of course, you were an ex-convict, when having a tattoo was largely about making yourself look like less of a target at shower time. But now, every Tom, Dick or Harriet has one. A recent survey found one in five of us has now found it necessary to permanently decorate our skins with ink. You can barely walk down to Cooplands for your daily sausage roll these days without being affronted by some young mother with a fag in one hand and a pram in the other, with some generic Celtic-cross trying to escape out of the back of her ill-fitting, exposed G-string and up her back. It's the same with blokes.
The number of lads, barely out of their teens, almost covered from head to toe with garish skulls and naked women designs is growing at a frightening rate. It makes me shudder when I imagine them turning up for their first job interview. "So, Mr Smith, what was it about the tattoo of Satan on your forearm that you believed would qualify you for the role of primary school classroom assistant?" Needless to say, I haven't got a tattoo.
The very thought of desecrating my beautifully moisturised skin with something that can't be removed makes me feel queasy.
The thing that worries me most about this tattoo lark is that, at the moment, it's the height of fashion.
And, like all things fashionable - it will soon be out of fashion. Unlike Becks and co, who'll be able to have their hideous Prison Break-style body art removed by some state-of-the-art laser technology, the rest of the poor saps with Lady Gaga tattooed across their back will be stuck with her for life. And it may be fine when you're young and pert.
But just imagine what you'll look like when you're old and wrinkled. We'll look like a nation of mouldy satsumas that some child has scribbled on with biro. In Japan, when hoodlums joined the Yakuza, they had to have their little finger chopped off as a sign of loyalty and identification.
adidas shoes This was an irreversible act in exactly the same way as adorning your body for life with a picture of your favourite member of Boyzone. Most Yakuza spent the rest of their lives regretting it and failing badly in attempts to open tightly fitted jam jars. So, I beg of you, if you're thinking of having
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