Deborah Hill Cone: You see rebel chic, I see trailer trash

Good news, chaps - we can't get to the top half of the OECD but we can excel in other ways. New studies have shown we are top in the world for indiscriminate boffing and for smoking pot. I wouldn't be surprised if we were also top achievers for tattoos per capita. We could market ourselves as the bogan capital of the world.

The other day I was having lunch at Prego and holding forth loudly, expressing mystification about why so many people want to get tattoos. Nifty if you're a sailor or a pirate, for sure, but on a nice girl who went to Dio? Not glamorous, just an embarrassing tramp stamp. I had to stop mid-rant as the waiter leaned over to place my lunch in front of me, revealing his entire forearm was covered in ink. "Don't worry, he will only spit in your food," sighed my long-suffering lunch partner, a judge. Don't think she has a tattoo, but who knows these days? They're everywhere.

We definitely do seem to have some fixation with skin pictures. I should be grateful that Air New Zealand's hit safety video - which set the internet on fire last week - merely features temporary body paint. Next time it won't be so easy to wash off.

I love that we have an acute eye for larrikins and oddballs in this country but a tattoo as an automatic emblem of rebellion is just a lazy pose.

Admittedly, I grew up in a family where chewing gum was considered the height of vulgarity. Not sure what my mother would have made of a tattoo, but I doubt she would have been sold on the "it's body art" theory. When I was a kid living in square Hamilton it seemed people aspired to move up the social ladder - get a Dralon lounge suite, some lovely Axminster and a new Mitsubishi Sigma. That was the suburban dream then.

These days, the height of chic among the bourgeoisie is to trade down, and look like an ersatz version of a trailer-trash baby mama. Polly Vernon, in the Observer, says tatts "are a subversive counterpoint to a red carpet gown". I am more in sync with Jewish writer Linda Grant, who sees an aggression behind the fashion for skin stamps, and doesn't miss the connection with that other sort of tattoo, the branding of Holocaust victims.

I realise there is a fraught cultural subtext to saying you don't like tattoos: it's akin to saying you don't like Polynesian culture since it has been part of Maori and Pacific culture for hundreds of years. In my case, this is not true. But nonetheless it is bogus to mindlessly glamourise anything to do with ancient rites in a noble savage kind of way. I did try to find some data on our tattoo prevalence, but the nice lady at Statistics said (very politely) they don't keep "that kind" of info. The Ministry of Health said they would get back to me, but since it was not swine flu-related I am not holding my breath.

Having a tattoo used to have a stigma attached to it. Does it still? I'd say yes. They might be de rigueur in Grey Lynn, but I am not so sure that the rest of the world thinks they are so cool. Being truly subversive is much tougher than simply getting some ink squirted under your skin. No matter how much that hurts.

deborah@coneandco.com