Tattooing

Federal agencies are required to provide safe and healthy work environments for their employees. Therefore, if a supervisor can demonstrate that an order to wear a hard hat and steel-toed boots on a particular worksite is for safety reasons, such a decision would be all but impossible for a disgruntled employee to successfully contest. Another issue that was raised by commenters was body piercings, body art, and other forms of "body modification." A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) online article from August 2004 defined tattooing "as the art of permanently depositing pigment into the skin to a depth of 1-2 mm to create a design," noting that the "art dates back to 2000 B.C. as a tribal custom in many different parts of the world, including Africa and North America." The article went on to define ear/body piercing as "the insertion of metal jewelry into skin tissue using an ear piercing gun or long needles. The most frequently pierced sites, according to Health Canada, include ears, nose, navel, lip, tongue, nipples and genitals." (Author's Note: "Ouch!"). The CBC article further noted that there was evidence that body piercing was growing in popularity and noted that between 1960 and 1980 the number of U.S. women who were tattooed quadrupled, totaling between 50,000 and 100,000 tattoos annually. A footnote to the article, "New Developments on Tattoos and Body Piercing in the Workplace," by Laurel A. Van Buskirk, published in the December 2005 edition of the New Hampshire Business Review, cited a 2003 online Harris Poll (conducted by Harris Interactive) which found that 16 percent of all U.S. adults had at least one tattoo. The age group with the highest incidence of tattoos was the 25-29 year-olds (36 %), followed by 30-39 year olds (28 %). I can offer "anecdotal evidence" of the increase in body piercing and body art among younger generations. A few years ago, our daughter took me to a sold-out Dave Matthews Band concert at Denver's Mile High Stadium. By visual observation, Kris and I were among a very small minority of fans there who did not sport tattoos and/or body piercings (beyond the "traditional" ear-piercing to allow for pierced earrings).