Exploring society’s complicated relationship with the lower back tattoo.
No man forgets the first time he gets busy with a woman bearing a lower back tattoo, sometimes colloquially referred to as a “tramp stamp.” One minute, he’s at the bar having a deep conversation with a nice lady about life and whether aliens exist. The next, he’s got her bent over the hood of his car, howling at the moon in the throes of passion. Somewhere mid-thrust, the man, perhaps squinting through the haze of a flickering dusk-till-dawn light in an adjacent alley, catches a glimpse of a message imprinted across her lower back, positioned just slightly north of her back door. The perplexities mount as he tries to decipher the cryptic dispatch without going limp—or worse, giving her any indication that there’s been a sudden shift of focus from impending orgasm to interpreting the flesh-affixed missive before him.
If the light hits this brand above her butt just right, the man might notice it’s a tattoo of a butterfly, a spider…or is that a fairy giving me the bird? In some cases, it can be hard to tell. The divulgence of a so-called tramp stamp might just as easily reveal somebody’s name, an inspirational quote, the name of a band or even the lyrics to a song.
Such a discovery on a first-time fling can be an emotional experience, akin to stepping into an art gallery and finding yourself marveling deeply at a particular piece, even though you can’t quite make out what it means. It’s like standing before the work of Jackson Pollock and appreciating the mark of madness, but not quite understanding what led to that particular choice…or what the fuss is all about. All of this is to say that a lower back tattoo, like any piece of art, is subjective. It’s like they say—beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and sometimes that beauty can be particularly difficult to discern. “The worst [lower-back tattoo] I’ve seen belonged to a girl I dated,” Bryan of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, tells HUSTLERMagazine.com. “It was a biker tribute to her ex—‘RIP Gunny’—and I had the joy of seeing it every time we went doggy-style.”
