There is a certain mystique about tattoos. For some people, covering their bodies in piercings and permanent ink is a serious form of self-expression, one that borders on a religious experience.

The art of tattoo dates back centuries. Tattoos were found on a 5,000-year-old man from the Bronze Age, and European explorers to the South Pacific found the native peoples of Borneo and Polynesia wearing more tattoos than clothing. In fact, the word tattoo comes from the Tahitian "tatu," which means "to mark something." Some historians think tattooing has been around since 12,000 B.C.

Pete Townshend of The Who wrote and performed a tribute to the ancient art of human identification and protection in a song called "Tattoo, which appeared on the 1967 album, "The Who Sell Out."

Townshend sings, "Welcome to my life, tattoo.
I'm a man now thanks to you. I'm sure I'll regret you,
but the skin graft men won't get you, You'll be there when I die, tattoo."

I’ve never been one to pine away for a permanent picture of anything on my body. Tattoos involve using needles to put permanent ink three skin layers deep into whatever part of your body you wish to identify.

On a recent trip to Indianapolis, I had occasion to engage in a little tattoo show and tell, and while I’m not planning to get my own body art, I did find the experience fascinating. Even more compelling was finding out exactly what made them do it.

Jeremy, 24, wears his hair in that trendy style common to the 20-something group—sides and back "high and tight," but with the top half pulled back into a pony tail on the crown of the head. Jeremy is a manager at a block manufacturing company; he sports pierced ears, and admits to having had a pierced eyebrow and bottom lip.

"The company I work for said the earrings were okay, but the other piercings had to go," he says. "I was surprised that they didn’t mind the tattoos."

Jeremy’s tattoos are nothing short of impressive. They are all done in black ink, and cover his entire arm, from shoulder to wrist. On his forearm, a man saws off his own leg; under the bicep, a nude woman is tortured. There are skulls and chains and daggers and all manner of suffering and death, some of it recognizable from the covers of rock bands like Metallica and AC/DC. Other images apparently were just the imagination of the artist.

Jeremy takes a pull from a bottle of Bud Light before rolling up his shirt sleeve so I can get a better view of these horrific renderings. He tells me that chose these images because he isn’t very good about expressing himself, and had a tendency to repress a lot of his emotion, especially anger. I am fascinated by the intricacy of the artwork. He says he plans to get his other arm done, too, but expects it would probably be a little different theme. A crown of thorns adorns his left bicep.

"This is the first tattoo I ever had, and I’ll probably just get it covered with something else," he says. "It’s flash."

Flash?

"Flash is the tattoo you get when you go to a place and just pick from the designs that they have (displayed)," Jeremy informs me. "This isn’t a very good tattoo. See how the ink kinda runs?"

Shannon, a 32-year-old mother of two, has a variety of tattoos—all in color. There is the palm tree and sunset on her right calf, the go-kart on her left shoulder and arm, and various vines, flowers, and tropical-themed subjects across the small of her back, across her shoulders, and down her arm. She wanted a tattoo while she was in high school, but her parents wouldn’t let her get one. So, she waited until she got married at the age of 21. She says that getting a tattoo or "tat" is very painful—more so than childbirth. "If you decide that you don’t like the tattoo, it’s better just to get it tattooed over with something else because getting them removed is really more painful," she says.

Her husband, Chris, who also is in his early 30s, takes off his shirt to display a sprawling depiction of a go-kart and driver. The driver is their 6-year-old son. Chris has pierced ears as well.

Shannon confesses that she had her nipples pierced because her husband found the idea "sexy." I tell her I would have to draw the line at body piercing, no matter how much my husband might want me to get it done.

Shannon and Chris had the tragus/tragi of their ears pierced. For the uninitiated—or the unpierced—the tragus is the projection of skin-covered cartilage attached to the head just above the earlobe. Quite a painful place to get a piercing, I’ve heard.

Young Joe has tattoos on most of his body, or at least, what is exposed. He is wearing those shorts that young men favor these days—you know, the ones that hang so low on the hips the crotch is at the knees. He hikes up his pant leg to show me this massive color tattoo of a tattoo machine.

"What is it?" I inquire, puzzled.

"A tattoo machine," he says with some pride.

The tattoo covers the skin of his thigh from his hip bone to his knee. I learn it was done in several visits by a local tattoo artist who charges $10 or $15 an hour. Jeremy, standing by, comments that he has about $5,000 in tattoo "hours" on just his arm.

"Tattoos are sacred to me," says Joe. "They are graffiti."

He sports three eyebrow piercings, a couple of nostril piercings, and a lower lip piercing. I hear a clacking against his teeth—his tongue is pierced. I don’t ask whether he has any other unseen piercings. He has numerous ear piercings, and his earlobes are separated by a ring about a 1/2" thick and about an inch in diameter—my father would have called it a washer. The skin of the earlobes hangs down a little on either side of the ring. I put my finger through the ring because at first I thought it might be filled with plastic or glass. He also has a tragus piercing in each ear.

But the piercings seem secondary to the drama of the tattoos. Not quite Ray Bradbury’s "Illustrated Man," the elaborate, intricate skin carvings are a testimony to the efforts of one tattoo artist, a 44-year-old fella by the name of Tim. I meet him, finally, and we go outside the pub to talk more about tattoo artistry.

Tim is about 6’8," a big man wearing a navy and white bandana on his head and a pair of hoop earrings. He has tattoos, also, but fewer than those of his customers. He has been doing tattoos about 15 years or so, although he is a paint contractor by profession.

"For me, tattoo is like a religious experience," he explains. "Like a calling."

He says he "screwed up" his chance at art school due to making bad decisions about women in his younger days, and did a stint in the U.S. Army before his career as a paint contractor. When he first started experimenting with tattoo, he says he had a passion for it and what it represents.

"Women are what really killed a lot of the tattoo business," Tim laments. "Once they decided that tattoos were fashion, parlors started springing up all over the place."

Tim used to make a lot more money in tattoo art than he does these days, but he doesn’t care that much about the money.

"I like coming up with designs for customers, and working with them to get the tattoo to where it matches what they have in mind," he says. "I don’t do anything that looks Satanic or like devil worship, either. There is some scary stuff and people out there these days."

Unlike Jeremy, Chris, or Joe, Tim had heard of Bradbury’s classic book and had read it in high school. He hadn’t thought about it in a long time, though, and says he might have to go back and re-read it. He comments that he would like to have his whole body covered in tattoos.

"They’re like a religion," he says. "There’s just no other way to explain how I feel about it."