My 17 my year old daughter is bound and determined to get a tattoo in 6 weeks when she turns 18. She is a beautiful girl, and I was distraught about it but she is in her rebellion phase. Other than locking her up for a few years I have run out of options... :)
Several months ago, I read a post by another Freeper that I thought summed it up nicely: A tattoo is a permanent expression of a temporary feeling.
My daughter, the Coast Guardian, got her first one when she was 19 and her ship was in port in Hawaii. Nothing we could do about it, although I had expressed negativity.
Our other children have been told there will be no tattoos or weird piercings while we are supporting them. We have to hope nobody turns 18 and does it anyway, because I don’t know if we’d have the fortitude to say, “Fine, you’re an adult. Two weeks notice to move out, write when you find work.”
I guess it depends on how annoyed we were with the particular child to start with ;-). If Number One Son, who is 20, show up with a tattoo or gauges (?) in his ears, I’ll have no problem putting him on the curb with his guitars, his hair products, and a sign that says “Will Do Nothing For Food.”
I'm assuming she is moving out to live on her own when she turns 18...
My house, my rules...
I will pray that her mind will be changed about getting a tattoo. It seemed like 80% of my daughter’s friends got tats at 17-18. These were top students. I was thankful that my daughter didn’t consider one. Now I see all these pretty 19-20 yr olds with ugly ink marks on their bodies and know that they will soon wonder what in the world they were thinking. I have started to notice that the new thing is to gauge their ears.