Food for Thought on Tattoos

This is pretty good.  I like how it goes beyond the simplistic moral judgment of narcissism, to other things that may be going on.

The "transition from the body as physique to the body as text."

"It may strike old-fashioned types as pedestrian narcissism and adolescent conformity, and sometimes it surely is. But in a deeper and more troubling way, it is canny and subversive artifice, spiced with a moralistic claim to personal liberation."