I just think that there are dozens of places one should tattoo if one so desires — the arm, the neck, the torso, the pelvis, the back — but the face should be left alone.
Jamie “Godhead Platinum” Calloway of Dayton obviously disagrees with me.
The 33-year-old received national ink recently after her jail mug shot landed on The Smoking Gun’s website.
You can’t miss this noggin.
The word “GOD” is inked across Calloway’s forehead.
Calloway is in Montgomery County Jail on felony menacing by stalking charges reportedly involving a corrections officer.
CNN, Huffington Post and several other news organizations picked up the GOD on the forehead story and ran with it.
The mug shot is now in all sorts of “shocking tat” online photo galleries.
Calloway obviously didn’t start the face tat trend, if you can call it a trend.
The internet is filled with photos of celebrity and not-so celebrated folks with face tats.
It clearly is not the tat at issue. It is the location, location, location.
Long thought of as something naughty people do to prove how naughty they actually are, tattoos in recent decades have earned vast mainstream acceptance.
Tattoos no longer equal bad, dangerous rebels.
Super-lame nerds like me have tattoos (a badly drawn kitty cat on my shoulder).
Jackson Galaxy, the “cat whisperer” from Animal Planet’s “My Cat From Hell,” is covered in tattoos.
Again, it is not the tattoo.
More than one in three Americans between ages 18 and 25 had a tattoo in 2006, according to a Pew Research Center report.
More than 40 percent of Generation Xers have a tattoo.
That said, people generally aren’t in your face about their tattoos.
About 70 percent of those in the so-called Millennial Generation said their tattoos generally were kept hidden under clothing, Pew reported in 2010.
Seventy-three percent of those 30 and older say their tattoos usually are not visible.
But face tats still maintain that old-fashioned freak-out factor.
I can think of only a few professions in which one can get away with a face tat without turning heads – musician, tattoo artist, pharmacist, gardener, gang member and Mike Tyson.
Face tats are weird and menacing.
Charles Manson has a swastika on his head for a reason.
That said, it doesn’t matter what a tattoo is of – religious symbols, tribal symbols, tears, the likeness of J.K. Rowling ...
A face tattoo of Strawberry Shortcake or the parrot from Aladdin still would turn heads.
The face is one’s billboard.
We advertise all sorts of things on it through facial expressions, makeup and so forth.
It’s fine if someone has a raccoon on his or her face, just as long as that person is good with ending up in an online photo gallery of face tats.
Contact this columnist at arobinson@DaytonDaily News.com or Twitter.com/ddnsmartmouth.
What do you think?
What do you think of face tattoos? Are tattoos acceptable?