Tattoos have moved from the back room to the boardroom. You may not see them under that business suit, but body art no longer is the domain of just sailors, bikers and criminals. Spend any time at the beach or pool club, and you’ll notice that if you don’t have a tat, you’re probably in the minority.
You don’t even have to travel to the wrong side of the tracks to get one. Adrenaline New Jersey has three locations, Brick, the Ocean County Mall in Toms River and on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights.
And you don’t have to go into a creepy back room to get ink. Leilani and Biagio Pagliarulo, a husband-and-wife team, opened Biagio’s Tattoo Gallery at 3138 Route 10 in Denville in February. The pristine white walls are hung with art, not flash (numbered tattoo designs from which clients choose). The custom tattooing is done openly in the well-lighted gallery and eventually will be streamed live to their website.
Even celebrities, including women whose body image is everything, have jumped on this fashion bandwagon. Miley Cyrus has at least five tattoos. Eva Longoria Parker, Meagan Fox, Rihanna, Charlize Theron, Sienna Miller all have them, and Academy Award-winning actress Angelina Jolie is notorious for them.
Smart women have them, too. Pauley Perrette’s super-intelligent forensic scientist character, Abby Sciuto in the hit TV show “NCIS,” has a cool cobweb on her neck (and a Gothic fashion sense). Perhaps one of the world’s best-known women with tats is the title character of the best-selling book “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” brilliant 24-year-old hacker Lisbeth Salander, whose body art fascinates author Stieg Larsson’s hero Mikael Blomkvist.
Sailing, sailing
“American tattoos first filtered into our culture by means of the sailor,” says Angus Kress Gillespie, professor of American Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. “Whaling fleets visited islands in the Pacific Ocean, and they saw people with tattoos. Sailors got tattoos as a mark of prestige. It showed they were world travelers.”