Tattoos

It’s hard to look authentically rebellious these days, when even well-behaved businessmen wear earrings and ponytails and college students destined for quiet suburban lives have body piercings and tattoos. Tattoos, in particular, are not the radical, the bold violations of flesh and decoration, they once were. Available in New York from almost 1,800 licensed tattoo artists, tattoos are probably better and safer now than they’ve ever been more creative and varied, applied in many cases by serious, highly skillfull body artists. After finally there are tattoos like Risk Management. It is unlikely that the ambitious professional with a simple, understated, discreetly placed and wittily conceived trashy gift, or for that matter the teenager with her boyfriend’s name and two lovebirds emblazoned in the small of her back, will ever have tattoos on the face or a full chest or back “panel” or a tattooed arms or legs. Some tattoo fans, though, have transformed large portions of their...