SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLE WITH TATTOO
A negative connotation has been stuck to the inked people seeing that they are dealing with depression, rebellion, a criminal, or deviant because this is what emerged years ago. I encounter a lot of people with tattoos on their skin thinking if they were bad guys with no future decent jobs because most employers here in our country don’t accept these inked bodies. I remember my grandmother told me when I was younger that whenever she sees people with the tattoo she kept distant from them they will do no good to them or might hurt her. Then one time when I was on a jeep and these middle-aged women starting to mumble and look at the teenage girl in a jeep, I accidentally heard their words that this girl might be a “pokpok or a drug user”. In addition to this, most villain roles in movies played wearing black clothes, piercing, and tattoos, and people with tattoos viewed as bad influences or criminals because when someone has been prisoned, the prisoners gave each other a tattoo as a sign or any other significant meaning inside. While growing up through my environment, people around me, and in our Filipino culture I came up with these negative judgments of people with tattoos.
It seems the old tradition and history about tattoos has been forgotten. I read this website blog entitled “The forgotten Filipino Tattoo Tradition”, written by Rachel Sanchez, her mother, and her grandmother’s point of view about tattoos, according to her grandma tattoos are for prisoners, dirty and ugly that can cause infection or carrier of diseases that is why it is not acceptable in society. But her grandmother was aware that tattoos on ancestors and traditions that men wore ink on their chest and heads as signs of strengths while women wore detailed lines on arms and wrists as signs of beauty. After her grandmother’s answer, it’s her mom’s turn compelling that tattoos are skin decorations, and not aware of the traditions she all knew that her parents discourage these things. In this blog, it’s already hard to navigate and define because we are still lacking in history about ancestors it depends on us to connect to that culture despite the influences and manipulations. In our modern times, the negative outcome may have resulted from the people with tattoos themselves like for example ask few people of different ages what comes up to their mind about having tattoos or what is the meaning of that design they chose. Based on The Bedan Journal of Psychology 2016, entitled “The Experiences of Tattooing Among Selected Filipino Young Adults”, their target population was young adults ages 21-30 with one or more tattoos to describe the experiences, public perception, as well as the activities and behaviors of a group. The result of their tattoos are art, self-expression, the feeling of belongingness in the group, and attractiveness but with discrimination from the public or employment. They even involved in using “marijuana” usage, brawls, and alcohol consumption but no regret on getting a tattoo. In our society, you will observe the negative judgment by also what is more visible on the public we will believe in our first impression and what our eyes witnessed rather than acknowledge rational thinking. One of the latest trend news about the tattoo-related issue was about Bella Poarch’s Rising Sun arm inked, she is a famous Filipina social media influencer raised in TikTok. Given her brought up, she did not mean to know the history behind that tattoo, the arts refers to the symbol of Japanese militarism and colonial rule to Koreans. But, Bella apologizes to Koreans as you can see on her Tiktok video, and feel sorry about what happened. This is why tattoo from our ancestry had a very deep meaning hopefully in the modern world, we should be more cautious about what we put in our skin as art because it reflects in our identity also.
We experience cognitive dissonance believing they will do harm and a bad influence on society but do you remember the time that “Whang-Od”, a 102 years old tattoo artist in Kalinga province of the Philippines was featured on TV as a nominee for Gawad Manlilikha ng Bayan), because of her traditional artform and tattoo ink compositions of indigenous materials my negative perception in tattoos changed into a realization of more understandings. I see myself that time thinking more about the meaning of the design and through that, my mind opened that because of the negative outcome for some group of people the traditional meaning has been buried.
Photo credit to buzzpop.com