Tattoos are marks made onto the body different purposes depending on the person interested in getting tattooed. These marks may either be for: entertainment or religious purposes or even for reasons only known to the people under scrutiny. These tattoos may occur in ill practices such as bullying, in which the victims are forcefully tattooed or even it may happen due to peer pressure. Influence of friends who feel that tattoos are cool makes those without tattoos to develop an interest in it. Such are teenagers who often move along with current trends and changes that are adopted by their peers.
Teenagers with tattoos are most likely to be involved in ill manners such as drug abuse, immoral sexual behaviors and even suicide. These ills are depicted through the various activities that the teenagers with tattoos get involved in and for the case of immoral sexual behavior, rape gangs may be discovered to have a common tattoo that bonds the gang members together in their irresponsible behaviors. For drug abusers, the same concept applies because the drug abusers find a sense of commonality in the tattoos and in the illegal consumption of drugs.(Carroll et al 1025) For suicide cases, an example is a game known as blue whale challenge in which one of the steps towards completing the challenge was the tattooing of a whale on one’s forearm. Tattoos are dangerous for teenagers because they have detrimental effects as such.
Tattoos lead to medical complications in teenagers due to changes in colour which causes colour mismatch. Decorative tattoos cause infections and even allergic reactions. With age, the urge for tattoo removal is realized and Q-switched lasers used for tattoo removal require various modes of treatments, and which may also pose other problems during removal of multi-coloured tattoos such as pain, crusting, blisters or even pinpoint hemorrhage.(Mirko 108) There are also delayed symptoms such as pigmentary changes. These diverse effects of tattooing therefore discourage the urge for teenagers to get tattooed because the treatment of these complications related to tattooing is very expensive and it may lead to further complications hence tattooing should be discouraged by all means
The only positive impact that tattoos can have on teenagers is the boosting of the individual’s morale especially when they will feel accepted in the tattoo plagued society. This will therefore play a major role in shaping up the day to day lives of these teenagers as they relate with one another during the day-to day activities. The problem with teenagers is that they make decisions without looking at the effects of these decisions in future. A good example is that when these teenagers get tattooed, the need for the tattoo removal in future will come along with numerous disastrous health effects with a large price tag attached to them.
Tattooing in teenagers should therefore be discouraged by all means because the negative impacts of it outweigh the positive impacts; with the positive impacts being a thing that can be built through other means like the embrace of such practices as team building and even the dissemination of motivational talks to the teenagers. “The morale of a teenager is vital, but health and wellbeing comes first”. This is based on the setting of priorities in life in accordance to someone’s life expectations. Counselling of teenagers is very important because as the elder members of the society counsel the teenagers then they will understand about the effects of tattooing not only from their mentors but also from experienced people in the society.
Works cited
Carroll, Sean T., et al. “Tattoos and body piercings as indicators of adolescent risk-taking behaviors.” Pediatrics 109.6 (2002): 1021-1027.
Campisi, Mirko. “Complications of tattoos and tattoos removal: state-of-the-art in Italy.” Journal of Health and Social Sciences 1.2 (2016): 105-112.
