Don’t get me wrong.

I hate tattoos.

They say, “I never went to art school, but at least I can have the Chinese symbol for “chiaroscuro” on my ass cheek.”

They say, “Why yes, I am worried about becoming my parents.”

They say, “I may be a middle-aged middle manager, but in my cosplay dreams, I’m an ass-kickin’ Goth Faerie.”

But…if there’s one thing I hate more than bourgeois nostalgie de la boue trends, it’s bourgeois blandness and conformity.

Confusion arises, of course, because, for the past fifteen years, getting a tattoo has been a type of bourgeois conformity.

I well remember one of the last training meetings I attended, back a decade ago when still I worked at Starbucks. These always start with some self-consciously cheesy icebreaker question: in this case, “Show us your tattoos.” I was the only person there without one, including the trainer.

Now, whatever beefs you may have with the corporation (and people do have beefs with them; many valid, quite a boring number simply reflexive and chauvinistic, and Hi Metro!) it was at the time relatively enlightened. The dress code was a little heavy on the preppy, it is true, but they’d recently rescinded the “No Visible Tattoos” rule under what I can only guess was heavy pressure from HR who said, not without solid justification, that there were hardly any qualified, capable barista candidates at the time who didn’t have ink.

And there was much rejoicing.

People I’d been working alongside for years suddenly showed up to work in short sleeved shirts, displaying quite an impressive array of Maori or Haida designs up, down, and around the arms.

I am reminded at this point of the “no unnatural hair colours” rule and the mess that Dan Fazio made of his very, very black, Italian hair the night he got drunk and tried to become Billy Idol. I got to eyeball the result when worked with him the next morning, and it was magnificent. Instead of combing the bleach through his hair, he had instead grabbed clumps and, apparently, rubbed the peroxide down to the roots. The overall effect was something between leopard and ocelot, on a backdrop of black, starkly outlined with brown at the edges of each golden splotch. Quite spectacular, actually.

Natural colours, all.

It was just Dan’s bad luck that this was the day the VP for Canada happened to be doing the rounds of stores. Roly Morris is not a man to mess with. And he’s not a man to walk-up-to-the-line-and-dip-a-toe-over-while-you-giggle with, either, particularly when you’re spectacularly hung over. While Dan made drinks at the bar, I watched Roly move slowly up the line, eyes narrowing with each step. When he got up to the till he spoke, and until that time I’d never seen someone speak without moving any part of his face, nor had I known that humans had the power to lower the ambient temperature several measurable degrees Celsius simply by greeting one another.

“Good.

Morning.

Dan,”

he said.

Dan stared back, eyes wide and body frozen, like a leopard-spotted bunny facing a king cobra. “Uh. Morning, Roly?”

“It’s.

A.

Nice.

Day.

Isn’t.

It.

Dan?”

“Uh, yeah. I made your drink!” said Dan, handing over the latte with extremely un-Dan-like unctuousness. Dan, you see, was very cool. Dan and his band went on tour with the Scorpions and got kicked out of Germany for being “too metal.” But Dan knew that here he was up against something much more formidable than a bunch of Eurogroupies and some elderly headbangers.

“I’ll.

See.

You.

Around.

Won’t.

I.

Dan?”

And, indeed, he did. 12 hours later Dan’s hair was restored to its original blackness, if somewhat more crispy, 18 hours later Roly’s assistant phoned the store to check on the hair situation, and a memo was composed and disseminated stating that, not only did hair have to be natural in colour, but also in colour distribution.

My advice to Dan that he claim Big Cat heritage went unacted upon, alas.

Tattoos. We were talking about tattoos. It’s a blog post about tattoos.

Strangely, while I’ve been writing this post, the Starbucks Canada official website went down. I don’t know my own strength!

So, Starbucks had, then tossed, a no-visible-tats rule. When it did so, many a tat saw sunlight for the first time in years (at least on the clock). Many, many more virgin-hided baristas rushed out to proclaim their love for unicorns, vaguely Celtic knotwork, or Black Flag with some fresh ink.

Several months later, about the time they committed to replaced the existing La Marzocco machines (I don’t care what they say, they’re not as good as Cimbali) with those inferior robotic things that did everything but add the sprinkles on top (to standardize the beverage experience, and hoo, boy, did they ever, standardized the hell out of it, lower) and so much for my beloved 16-second shots, they rescinded the freedom they had bestowed.

Problem: ink everywhere.

Ink on necks, ink on hands, ink on ears, ink on legs. Even ink on faces. So, what does a shift supervisor or manager of some standing but some ink now do, when the company again bans visible tattoos? Retire on that cushy pension? Segue into a job at a Harley dealership? Sue? Strike?

In any case, this post over on Valleywag got me wondering: now that ink is so pervasive, are tattoos the canary in the mineshaft? Is a ban on tats the first sign of the End Times? After all, if you can’t control the flow of blood from the gaping wound in the jugular, you can always turn your attention to, and try to control, the capillaries, no?

Who else bans visible tats? 

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