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For tattoos in particular: it entirely depends on context. On a ski trip back during Covid, we had a mixed gender group, and all the girls had tattoos of various sorts, and none of the men did. That led to some teasing: all the men are squares etc. But the idea that they indicate some latent violent criminality in the women is laughable: all of us were well-educated and had highly paid corporate jobs, and I would be surprised if any of us had gotten into a violent altercation in our lives. It functions more as a piece of jewelry or clothing to show off how cool and stylish you are, which women care about and men don't.
It's a silly fad (and I'm sure some will regret getting one when the fad dies), but whatever tattoos might have once indicated about a person (besides wanting to be perceived as cool) is gone since they've been normalized. At least for most tattoos: face tattoos still provide a useful signal.
Context is exactly that. Did any of the tattoo girls look like this? If an individual looking like this were in the vicinity, would you guys have invited him to hang out, or would you have avoided him? Would your group have finger-wagged at anyone wanting to avoid this person due to the tattoos since "tattoos are now normalised" and they don't tell you anything about latent criminality?
I'm betting your group would not. Because the tattoos in that case would indeed be a signal, one that even "cool stylish fashion piece" tattoo girl would ignore at her peril. (Quite literally, as this "tattoo artist" is a convicted murderer).
Yes I agree 100%. But in this aspect tattoos are like clothes. It's not tattoos in themselves that are bad news in terms of social signaling but the type of tattoos.
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Of course, for women, tattoos do not show anything of the violent crime kind. It just likely shows more mental instability, more neuroticism, more "easiness", more chance that she's a single mom... More dysfunction. Can I prove that? No, but it's an indicator for me. They understand it too, if they're mocking you for being squares for not having them.
Yeah. The tattooed women are not (necessarily) violent themselves, they just associate with and get into relationships with the tattooed guys who are drug addicts, small-time drug dealers, petty criminals, drunks, and violent.
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Still, one only need to go to a criminal courtroom to observe that tattoos on females are indicative of criminality. A while back I was in court and a woman had been arrested on a fairly old warrant. It wasn't violence per se, but she made a stupid video of herself shooting a gun into the air. The kicker is it had one of those cheap auto-switch adjustments so it is technically an automatic per statute. She was, of course, 4 months pregnant and engaged. But she also had tattoos, the same ones from the video. So what do you do with a 22 year old who is clearly more mature than the 19 year old who was a reckless idiot, and also eligible for a very long prison sentence.
Offer a suspended sentence where the whole thing is forgiven if she completes probation. Or knock it down to the charge for shooting a gun in the air(illegal with good reason)/handgun while underage(in the US handguns require 21). There's lots of solutions and she might well get screwed by an uncaring system.
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