The quest for edgy authenticity can take perfectly nice people down some peculiar paths. We all know that guy. Let’s call him “Harry”. He went to Charterhouse (day pupil), but now works at Boiler Room. Harry will invariably have some kind of a tattoo – you can see it on his leg poolside at Hackney’s lido – which he will “rock” with his gold chain (plated) and pristine Reebok Classics. (He still likes to go up to women and sing the Streets lyric “So let’s put on our Classics/And we’ll have a little dance, shall we?”)
And it’s about to get worse. Way worse. We should have seen it coming when tattoos crept up necks, higher and higher, dumb and dumber, to their final destination: the face. Yup, face tattoos are a thing now. And we bet they’ll be making their way from Soundcloud rappers such as Post Malone, Lil Peep, Lil Pump and XXXTentacion, where the more modern version of this trend originates, to Harry’s face quicker than you can say, “That’s not real, right?” For once, your mother was right, Harry – don’t do it.
For a start, Soundcloud rappers are human memes first, musicians second; theirs is a kind of performance art that leaps off of Instagram and into their real lives, often with tragic consequences. Lil Peep (House Rules wrote about him with much hope in August 2017, only for him to die of a drug overdose the following November) was set to become a huge star. His talents went beyond his permanent face doodles. Yet while alive, even Peep could see the problem with getting such in-your-face ink: “It can make it harder to get a job when your face is covered in tattoos,” he admitted.
Rapper Wifisfuneral recently unveiled XXXTentacion-inspired face tattoos in memory of the recently murdered Florida-based rapper. Meanwhile, Post Malone, a breakout star of Soundcloud rap, told TMZ, “I kind of just wanted to piss my mom off. I know she’s really upset. I’m sorry. You only live once.”
So, will getting face tattoos for Harry transform him from posh wally to Xanax-popping millennial rap star? Well, no. Still, they’ll make for a good ice-breaker when he starts at Papa’s private equity firm.
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