What Military Tattoos Record

By Kevin Fuller

A simple title leads this article because, in some ways, it really is that simple: tattoos and the military have always gone together.

For generations, sailors crossed horizons most civilians would never see, returning home with tattooing traditions, techniques, and imagery collected abroad and bringing them back into civilian life.

Raymond Chandler, then sergeant major of the Army, once defended the Army’s now-repealed tattoo policy as a matter of “maintaining a uniform look.” By that logic, of course, tattoos would be perfectly acceptable if everyone had the same barcode.

The truth is that tattoos have long been part of warrior culture and military tradition.

Jariko Denman, a highly respected veteran of the 75th Ranger Regiment, was once asked how he would write a tattoo policy for the entire force. He declined to get into the specifics. Instead, he addressed the part of the debate that often goes unsaid:

“Tattoos are often labeled ‘unprofessional’ by the meek in the military. But when your profession is to kill people in close combat, your appearance can and should reflect a willingness to go to extremes.”

Denman deployed to combat 15 times as a Ranger. He often came home from a deployment and got a tattoo or two: ideas conceived while he was overseas. Asked to describe the resulting collection, he calls it “consistently inconsistent.”

That description cuts against one of the central assumptions behind military tattoo regulations: that tattoos can be meaningfully judged by appearance alone.

Some of what the ink actually records:

• A deployment, not a symbol.
• A platoon, worn on the leg by everyone who served in it.
• The silhouette of someone who did not come home.
• A job title you no longer hold.

None of that meaning is necessarily visible from the outside. You cannot regulate it simply by what it resembles.

From a scientific and psychological perspective, Dr. Adam Magers, an Army combat veteran and therapist, arrives at much the same conclusion from another direction. Symbols cannot be reduced to fixed definitions. Searching the word eagle will not tell you what an eagle means to the person wearing it.

As Magers puts it:

“Images choose us, rather than the other way around.”

Which leaves us with an uncomfortable problem: tattoo regulations often attempt to sort and judge tattoos according to the one variable that may carry the least meaning: their outward appearance.

Bottom Line

The stated reason for reversing many of the military’s restrictive tattoo policies was that society had changed, and the military needed to change with it.

True enough.

But it is also somewhat beside the point.

The record was being kept the entire time: on skin, in notebooks, in sketchbooks, and eventually on iPads bought before short-notice deployments. Whatever the policy happened to say that year, servicemen and women continued documenting where they had been, who they had served beside, what they had lost, and who they had become.

Jariko Denman and Dr. Adam Magers both appear in For The Record Vol. II, part of an ongoing series archiving military tattoo flash and the stories behind it.

The current volume, Vol. III: Tattoos of War, continues that work with contributions from veteran artists across the U.S., British, and Canadian armed forces.

More information is available at https://store.fortherecordbook.net.

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As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.