In a new essay at The European Conservative, Dalrymple explores the explosion of tattooing in the modern West through the lens of Alexandre Lacassagne, the 19th-century French forensic pathologist who first studied the psychological meaning of tattoos in European society. Lacassagne saw tattoos as expressions of personal symbolism long before they became mainstream; TD suggests that their current ubiquity tells us something unsettling about contemporary culture and its search for identity, freedom, and meaning.
Read the full essay here.
“So we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies.”
(William Shakespeare)
Speaking of prison tattoos and those of butterflies. Perhaps King Lear does not want to face his cowardly, felonious self in this.