Since I was little I always saw how many adults demonized tattoos, I saw how these people were compared to drug addicts, prostitutes and criminals simply because they had marks on their skin, at that time I did not fully understand the meaning of tattoos or how our Ancients used the definitive mark of ink on the skin as a means of preparing for war or simply making an offering to the gods.
In the past, when East and West began to connect through navigation, sailors had tattoos of different images referring to their experiences sailing the seas and generating a cultural and sociological exchange that would begin to create an aesthetic that would allow people to create counted statements by the marks on his skin.
This is how tattoos arrived in the United States and since sailors were considered a poor working class and usually associated with piracy, their tattoos were classified as a symbol of vandalism, rebellion and subversion.
According to an article published by the UNAM in Mexico “there was a strong worldwide mobilization of the Mara Salvatrucha, a group of young Salvadorans with shaved heads, with colorful tattoos on their faces and bodies. They painted a legend that said: "My God, forgive me for my crazy life", and in their eyes small tears that meant the number of murders they had committed. They had a physical construction of violence, informality and delinquency”
It is in this way and over time that the use of tattoos was normalized at a popular level and in the same way their symbolic value was lost, nowadays tattoos are a fashion present in almost all cultures worldwide and are no longer a reference to vandalism, they are even magazine covers and objects of desire, which is fine since, in the words of the writer Jack London, “Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.”