When my older brother got his first tattoo, it was a cross symbol near his left shoulder blade, and my parents nearly blew a gasket. Perhaps it was a generational conflict, but neither my father nor my mother could understand what made their dear son to get a tattoo out of a sudden impulse. My brother, who was then an up-and-rising medical student with a promising future, decided to mark his body physically and his life figuratively with a ‘tramp mark’ (in my mother’s words).
