Tattoo etiquette
Eric Felten
I sometimes feel as though I am the last man in America without a tattoo. Body art is one of those modern phenomena that is one day outre and, the next, obligatory. The transition can be so swift that companies have a hard time knowing what employee acts are to be allowed and what practices are out of bounds. That said, I think it’s clear by now that tattoos aren’t just acceptable on the job. They are likely to be protected by the courts if any business is foolish enough to require, without a very good reason, that their employees cover up their ink.
Nearly a century ago, architect and critic Adolf Loos delivered a lecture, “Ornament and Crime,” that famously declared, “The modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate.” Say that as an architectural critic assessing the uses and abuses of ornamentation, and you might just start an ascetic artistic movement. Say it in the HR department of a modern corporation and you’re just begging to be sued.
A few weeks ago, Law360 warned, “Employers that restrict tattoos should tread carefully.” It’s not that wearing ink is protected by statute, according to the legal trade paper, just that the moment seems near when courts will miraculously discover that wearing tattoos is a constitutional right. (Now might be a good time to get some tattoos illustrating emanations and penumbras.)
“I don’t know of any law that directly protects having tattoos,” Chicago lawyer Andrew Scroggins told Law360. Such are the issues — those in which an absence of red-letter law presents judges with the opportunity to improvise — with which courts have the most fun.
Two years ago, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission backed a fast food worker who maintained his wrist tattoo was protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act because it was part of his religious observance. The server said he was obliged to display the tattoo as a tenet of his faith, a little-known Egyptian brand of neo-paganism called Kemeticism. If you want to wear a tattoo in a conservative, ink-averse environment, just remember to declare you are Kemetic.
In California, tattooed workers have it over any stodgy tattoo-averse employer. All they have to do is declare their tattoos express political opinions. Then again, I suspect that were one to have a visible MAGA slogan on one’s arm, employers in California may prove to be less tolerant of the body art than if one was sporting a Maori face tattoo.
Which brings us back to Mr. Loos and his animadversion for tattoos. It’s hard these days to recall the role tattoos had in an appalling practice of the 18th and 19th centuries — the collecting of severed heads.
Naturalist Joseph Banks sailed with Capt. James Cook to the South Pacific in the 1770s and discovered that New Zealand tribesmen were in the habit of chopping off and then preserving the heads of their defeated enemies. Banks traded with an old Maori man for a preserved head with a heavily tattooed face. Back in Europe, the tattooed head was a sensation. All the fashionable museums wanted them, especially because of the elaborate designs in their leathery flesh. “It was the intricate facial tattoos worn by Maori chiefs that made their heads particularly attractive to Europeans,” according to historian Frances Larson in her book Severed: a History of Heads Lost and Heads Found. Tattoos had once been symbols of a chief’s power and courage, but the Europeans made such a market for the nasty things that they became morbid mass-produced decorations. “Maori chiefs were forcibly tattooing their slaves before killing them to sell their heads for a profit,” Larson writes. By the 1890s, British Maj. Gen. Horatio Robley displayed some 30 Maori heads in his personal collection.
Before getting inked with Maori tattoos, consider this problem: It’s not that one is indulging in “cultural appropriation,” but nor is it a celebration of New Zealand’s indigenous people. One is embracing an art that, with the encouragement of Europe’s natural scientists of the day, nearly led Maori tribes to a genocide.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?