An Open Letter to University Presidents
12 min read
A tattoo is a memory of a moment in your life. But what if you’re no longer that person?
In 1982, 12-year-old Rosie Bloom (not her real name) stole a bottle of India ink from art class, and, along with a friend, took a sewing needle and tattooed something tough and punk sounding onto her knuckles.
She was inked.
Two years later she got her first “professional” tattoo. It was done by someone her friends knew. She went to his house, told him what she wanted—a skull and crossbones, as well as her name—and he tattooed her arm with the tattoo gun he owned. He did the work freehand. He didn’t show her a design or draw it first on her skin to see if she liked it. He even misspelled her name.
“I told him my name,” she says. “I said, ‘R,’ and he said, ‘R,’ and then he wrote R. I said, ‘O,’ and he said, ‘O,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he wrote S. RS. I said, ‘No, it’s not RS,’ and he said, ‘Alright, whatever,’ and he changed it. I think he put a flower there or something.”
As a young teen, it didn’t occur to her that tattoos were permanent—she didn’t lose sleep over the misspelling—or that a skull and crossbones might look tacky to her in a few years. “I was a stupid 14-year-old in a punk stage and that’s what I got,” she says. “I hated it. When I was about 18 I went to a professional place and asked the artist if he could hide it somehow. He went over it with the gun and made the bones into flowers.”
He put the acid onto my skin and it smoked. You could hear it burning. It melted the skin.
She also had the tattoos removed from her knuckles. “They weren’t cool,” she says. “They were trashy—I looked like trash and I wasn’t—they were hand-done. My older brother had an ex-girlfriend who I was really close with. I went to visit her and she took me to a tattoo parlor—she knew I wanted to get rid of the ones that people could see—and I went and the guy poured acid on my skin. I don't know what kind of acid it was. He put it onto my skin and it smoked. You could hear it burning. It melted the skin. But you could still see there was something there, and people asked me about it a few years later, after I became religious.”
Bloom is in her fifties now and a respected Jewish educator and community leader. She still likes tattoos—she’s never not liked tattoos—she just doesn’t like her tattoos.
Jewish law prohibits getting a tattoo. The Torah (Leviticus 19:28) says, “Do not make any tattoo marks on your skin,” and the Talmud (Makkot 21A) clarifies, defining the concept of “tattoo,” and the extent to which that applies. But the prohibition is against getting a tattoo, not having one—what’s done is done—and there’s no compelling Jewish reason to have them removed.
“I was almost 30 years old and I wanted to learn about my heritage,” Stephen Safer, the lead singer of the 1990s-era underground punk and metal bands, Grum and Vomitus, and now a licensed clinical social worker in Georgia, says. “I went to Israel. I was just learning the Hebrew alphabet, and I remember going down to the Western Wall—I didn’t really know the history, but I had heard of it before—and I had a bunch of piercings and tattoos on my arms and hands. I remember a couple of people, religious Israelis, said to me, ‘You’re impure. You shouldn’t be here.’ And that hurt me, but the truth is, it built me up, too.”
Stephen Safer
Safer credits his years of touring as a musician—as well as his experiences with the outsider punk and heavy metal communities—for giving him the skills to handle rejection. “When people say something like that—and they judge, or they put me down—that only strengthens me,” he says. “It galvanizes me and arouses me to be even stronger.” Although it was also being a part of that scene that inspired him to get tattoos. He got his first one at 17 at a tattoo parlor in Georgia that was lax when it came to checking IDs.
It took a few years—and a few more tattoos—before his parents found out. “We were recording a video for one of the bands I was in,” he says. “It was a live video and I had my shirt off. We were watching the VHS tape on the VCR and my mother happened to come into the room. She saw me singing and asked, ‘Stephen, who is that?’ I didn’t think, and I said, ‘That’s me.’ ‘What is that on your back?’ And that’s when the disappointment began.”
When people put me down, that only strengthens me. It galvanizes me and arouses me to be even stronger
He laughs at the absurdity of the situation. “She said, ‘What did we do to deserve this?’—and my father was a psychiatrist also—it was almost like a dark comedy. She was watering some plants in the house at the time, and started running after me with the watering can. I ran out the front door, and she ran after me screaming at me and trying to splash water on me. ‘What did we do to you? NOT MY SON!’”
Safer was covered in tattoos when he arrived in Israel in the early 2000s. He had them on most of his body, as well as his hands and neck, and on his skull for those times when he shaved his head. He studied at a yeshiva in Jerusalem, and then for a number of years at a yeshiva in New York. Sometime around 2003 he decided to have the more visible tattoos removed.
“It just became a conversation,” he says. “Every time I’d get called up to the Torah, or whatever would go on, it was constant. I don’t mind telling my story, but when it’s on repeat like that, I just wanted to have some space. I thought that by removing them it would not draw so much attention. And it worked. Now nobody really knows I have tattoos unless they see something that leaks out from under my shirt or something.”
Tattoos have been around for millennia. The world’s oldest tattoo shop is Razzouk Tattoo in Jerusalem’s Old City. Wassim Razzouk, the shop’s current proprietor, is a 27th generation tattooist, and his family has been tattooing crosses on Coptic Christians since the 1300s. They started their business in Egypt, and at some point (possibly as early as 1500), resettled in Jerusalem and continued tattooing Christian pilgrims visiting the holy city.
Will Wolfowich
Modern tattooing started in 1891 with the invention of the electric tattoo machine, although for most of the 20th century tattoos were considered taboo and primarily the purview of sailors, criminals, and circus performers. That changed in the 1970s when rock stars started to get them—the bluesy, psychedelic singer, Janis Joplin, had a design patterned after a South American bracelet tattooed onto her wrist shortly before her death in 1970—but didn’t go mainstream until the 1990s when celebrities, most notably Baywatch star, Pamela Anderson, began inking their bodies.
Polls vary, but today about 41 percent of millennials (people born between 1981 and 1996) have at least one tattoo, and that is the largest group by far. Generation X (1965-1980) is at 32 percent, and their children, Generation Z (1997-2012) is at 23 percent, although that percentage will probably grow as more of them turn 18. Tattoos were once a symbol of rebellion, but that’s no longer the case.
“Most people have them because it is just cool to have them,” Will Wolfowich, a student at Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem, says. He also has tattoos covering a significant part of his body. “People aren’t rebelling anymore by having them. The people who do think they’re rebelling, I think those are the people with face tattoos and tattoos on their hands—and they end up regretting it also—but a butterfly on your shoulder? No one is looking at you like, ‘Whoa, this guy is scary.’”
People often have meaningful reasons for getting certain tattoos, too. “I had a patient once who opened Stingray Body Art in Allston, Massachusetts,” Dr. Alan Rockoff says. Rockoff practiced dermatology in the Boston area for about 44 years before moving to Israel and did tattoo removal for patients when laser technology first became available in the mid-1990s. “It made a big impression on me. He asked me to come over and take a look. During my visit, I saw a couple bent over in a little cubicle. I leaned over and saw that they were tattooing rings on each other's fingers. It was so interesting. They were doing it sequentially, first he did it and then she did it. They were getting married and it was part of their desire to show their bond.”
At first it was about honoring my brother’s memory, but my brother’s memory is a lot deeper than just wanting to show people that I am honoring his memory.”
Although, at least for Wolfowich, he’s come to question just how meaningful getting a tattoo really is. “I thought about it from a deeper sense,” he says. “My brother passed away, and a lot of my tattoos are for my brother who passed away. But then I started thinking about it, I thought, ‘Do I need a tattoo on my arm to look at in the mirror and remember that he existed, or to remember who he was?’ It’s not worth it. My love for him is more than just skin deep. At first it was about honoring my brother’s memory, but my brother’s memory is a lot deeper than just wanting to show people that I am honoring his memory.”
According the 12th century scholar and codifier, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, the reason Jewish law prohibits getting a tattoo has to do with ancient pagan practices, and that believers would tattoo themselves to demonstrate that “they were slaves, sold to that god, and marked for its service” (Yad, Laws of Idolatry 12:11). For Maimonides, getting a tattoo is a statement, a permanent commitment to an ideology. But what if you no longer feel that way, or discover something you consider deeper or more meaningful?
Will and Rabbi Dov Ber Cohen at Aish
“One of the reasons I don’t have tattoos on my body is there is nothing I value in my mind, body, and soul so much that I want to indelibly etch it on my skin,” Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, author, and sometimes social commentator told Joe Rogan during an interview in April 2023 in a clip that subsequently went viral. “I want to leave room for me to have a possibly more enlightening thought later that would override whatever was my decision in that moment. And since I count myself among the lifelong learners, I am learning stuff all the time.”
Rosie Bloom isn’t as charitable. “I think that the reasons people get tattoos has to do with the same reasons why I wanted them,” she says. “People don’t feel validated. They are not really happy with themselves. I feel like there is a level of self-mutilation there which is not healthy. It’s like cutting. For me, it’s that I was in control of doing it—there was some control there for me—I remember feeling like I did something. I think it has to do with the trauma—I experienced some abuse as a child—I was able to do this to myself because I did this to myself. I was in control.”
Will today
Tattoo removal became much easier with the advent of laser removal technology, although it’s still a lengthy, expensive, and painful procedure. Will Wolfowich is in the middle of a multi-year process to get his tattoos removed. He says that after applying a topical anesthetic, the doctor zaps his skin for about 15 to 20 minutes—he can even smell it burning—and then he waits up to six months for it to heal before going back to do it again.
But bigger than the physical issue of removing tattoos is the change in attitude, the understanding that despite the marks left on your body—and contrary to deGrasse Tyson’s assertions—real growth is a state of mind, regardless of the wreckage left in its wake.
“After learning and integrating into an observant lifestyle,” Stephen Safer says about embracing religious Judaism, “I realize that the tattoos that I have serve a purpose. I have access to places and people that other people don’t necessarily have. The tattoos bring it down to earth. Some people feel they can connect better with somebody who has been through something and who has had this experience. I have access to reach down in the darkness and, with God’s help, bring people closer to the light. In that way, I am straddling a line. I got some removed and I would not get another one, so there is that piece of regret there. But it’s not a regret like, ‘Oh woe is me,’ I realize there is a purpose for it.”
Credibility is part of it, but there’s acceptance, too, which for some, means embracing your past, warts and all.
“As my kids have become adults and they are finding themselves, my relationship with them has shifted and I don’t mind them knowing anymore,” Rosie Bloom says, “I still think tattoos are beautiful—like when you see the Japanese mafia, it is awesome—and the tattoos and the subversive counterculture, I am drawn to that and I want to be that, but so much a part of me is not like that. When I first became observant—especially as a young married mother living in a new community—I really wanted to fit in. But as my confidence has grown with who I am, Jewishly, I don’t want to anymore. I am a Jew. We’re all women, married, whatever, but I have a different background to anyone I’ve ever known. And I’m fine with that.”
