On a recent reconnoitering stroll around the city, saw that an upscale tattoo parlor has opened in the East Village. Tattooing has only recently become legal in NYC. This was both a health and, as so much is in the US, a class issue. Tattoos, in western culture, were for centuries a (literal) mark of low-class status, with a touch of the exotic. Unlike Asia and Africa, the west never developed a system of tattooing royalty or warriors. For years tattoos were limited to sailors (who, one was free to imagine, probably got them in foreign ports where all sorts of illicit pleasures and sins were obtainable; or else down on the disreputable, dangerous docks of western cities) and other manual laborers, including incarcerated prisoners. The tattoo was taken up as a sign of outlawhood by, for example, motorcycle gangs. There are examples of tattooing in the upper-class west, but they're all transgressive. For example, the Victorians in England, especially women, did a brisk secret business in tattoos and the voyuerism available in the process of tattooing as a sexual stimulant; the beauty of the design, the permanence, and the pain were equal parts of the titillation.

In the 1980's and '90's, two things happened simultaneously. Tattoos began to surface on celebrities, again especially women. These were people with enough fame and money to be able to engage in transgressive behavior without getting in actual trouble for it -- a phony and public rebelliousness. This set a fashion for tattoos. At the same time, spurred by the spread of AIDS, the medical-products industry developed cheap disposable needles. The health threat of tattooing was vastly diminished at a time when the demand was vastly increasing. NYC, for its part, realized that aboveground businesses can be regulated in a way that underground ones can't. It might have also occurred to them that aboveground businesses pay taxes.

The first tattoo parlors to come out of the cold and hang street signs were the old illegal ones, where you used to have to knock on the door and say Fozzie Bear sent you. But now, with the advent of this new joint I just saw, I think the tattoo thing is over. This place has high ceilings, comfortable lighting, private booths in the back. It sells books on Asian art and paths to enlightenment; it sells incense and Thai silk pillows and has shakuhachi flute as its Muzak. And it takes credit cards. I'm predicting that the very things that made getting a tattoo attractive when it was a rebellion -- the pain and the permanence -- will be the things that put people off, now that tattoos are mainstream enough for a place like this. Who needs pain and permanence when all it gets you is something your math teacher and your aunt Mary also have?