My interest in professional sport these days ranges from minimal to nil, but even I could not altogether avoid or evade the hysteria over the recent World Cup, which recurs every four years. It would have been easier to miss the outbreak of the Third (or would it be the Fourth?) World War.
As everyone now knows, Spain beat Argentina in the final, in a match more remarkable for its non-sporting qualities than for its display of skill. There was something of a brawl afterwards. The Spanish were clearly the better side, and while they played a clean game (or one as clean, at least, as can be expected from a professional soccer team), the Argentinians played dirty.
But I noticed another very important difference between the teams: The Argentinians were far more heavily tattooed than the Spanish. Indeed, desultory research revealed that, of the 26 players in the Argentinian squad of players, 20 were tattooed. Could this explain the inferiority of the Argentinians to the Spanish?
I had already observed that when the Germans last won the World Cup, their team was much less tattooed than their opponents. Could it be that, in the modern world, the prevalence of tattooing is inversely proportional to intelligence, and that, though skill at soccer is principally one of physical coordination, higher intelligence is nevertheless an advantage in any match? Those who write on soccer often refer to “footballing intelligence,” as if it were a faculty of its own; but perhaps it is related positively to general intelligence as, say, musical ability is related to it, notwithstanding the populist demagoguery of Amadeus (the misleading film adaptation of the play of the same name).
Despite the expansion in the proportion of the population that is tattooed, one would still expect, where a brawl breaks out as it did after the end of the World Cup final, that the tattooed were more likely to be the originators of it than the untattooed. And so it was in this case.
Of course, one would also not expect there to be a one-to-one correspondence between tattooing on the one hand and low intelligence and bad behaviour on the other. Perhaps the greatest player in the history of the sport—certainly one of the greatest—is the Argentinian, Lionel Messi, and he has a hideously, totally tattooed forearm, but is neither stupid nor badly behaved. But generalizations may hold while individual instances seem to contradict them.
I was somewhat alarmed, therefore, to see that several of the winning Spanish team had either had promised or resolved to have the face of their trainer tattooed on themselves if they won the cup. This, I surmised, would be the beginning of the end of the predominance of the Spanish in world soccer, not having lost in their last 38 games in international competitions. If I were their trainer, I would strongly advise them not to have themselves tattooed, and this quite independently of aesthetic considerations (what is called body art is really, and invariably, body kitsch).
The phenomenon of tattooing has interested me ever since I noticed in the prison where I worked that almost 100 per cent of white British prisoners were tattooed. (This was hardly a new observation; awareness of the prevalence of tattoos among prisoners dating back at least to the days of Lombroso, the Italian doctor and anthropologist of the 19th century.) Among this population, the tattoos were initially quite amateur, mainly done with India ink, and included things like policemen hanging from lampposts or dotted lines around the neck with a pair of scissors and instructions to “Cut here.”
But gradually, the tattoos became more elaborate, and I noticed in the 1990s that this form of self-adornment (or mutilation) was beginning to ascend the social scale, and that the kind of people who once would never have been tattooed were now resorting to body kitsch.
At first, I interpreted this as an attempt at sympathetic identification by young middle-class intellectuals of weak intellect with those whom they considered the insulted and injured of the world. But if this interpretation were ever correct, it soon ceased to be, for the fashion spread too far and wide for it to hold. Tattoos retained their superficial connotations of rebellion and non-conformity, but they also became—in a deeper sense—marks of conformity, as tends to happen with all fashions, no matter how outrageous they may seem at the start. By means of tattooing, one could rebel and conform at the same time.
The tattooed often claim to be expressing themselves, but more often than not end up demonstrating how little they have to express. In a way, the vogue for tattooing is rather tragic: It points to the ever-greater difficulty people have in individuating themselves in a mass society. This, perhaps, also explains the vogue for giving babies names previously unknown to humanity, and unique to them. As circumstances force us to be more and more alike, we struggle to be different; but convention, like nature, is what cannot be escaped. We are inevitably creatures of convention and must choose between conventions on grounds other than their supposed conventionality or unconventionality.
Tattooing provides interesting lessons beyond itself. In the town in England in which I live for slightly more than half the year, there is a street on one side of which a man tattoos those who desire this form of self-mutilation (one famous tattooed person once said that he liked the pain of it).
On the other side of the street, the tattooist’s brother has opened an establishment for the removal of tattoos. He has installed an extremely expensive machine to this end, which will soon pay for itself. Tattoo removal, when the tattoos are extensive, is a long process, requiring many sessions. I was surprised to discover that, at least in England, tattoo removal is much more carefully licensed than tattooing itself.
But the point of my story is this: that both brothers contribute similarly to the country’s GDP, which metric, I suggest, is therefore not adequate to measure the welfare of a society.
If Alexander Pope were alive today, he would not write that the proper study of mankind is man; he would write that the proper study of man is tattoo. And in mankind, I include (for those who object to the word) womankind, for in one of the strange reversals of our time, more women are now tattooed than men.
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