Tattoos and Characterization

Ah: tattoos and video games.

I love Mirror's Edge and can't stop playing it, but Faith's tattoos really irks me, from a creative or compositional standpoint. If we look at Faith's pants and shoes, and watch her do what she does for 5 seconds, we know more about her than her ridiculous tattoos will ever tell us. That's because our actions define us, and people know us even through seeing ONE OUNCE of our actions. Whereas tattoos are just who we wish to be. They're like idols. They're like fetishized shrines of identity. Tattoos are what you want when you *want to* see something when you look in the mirror, BUT WHICH YOU DON'T ACTUALLY SEE because you either lack an appreciative vision of yourself or you are a fraud.

I mean come on DICE!! The bottoms of her pants are TIED, and she has SPLIT TOED SHOES. That is who she is, and it's goddam brilliant. The tattoos are just a brain fart.

The weird thing about Faith's tattoos is that the developers made them so that we would know something about her-- when actually they tell us nothing other than that Faith needs visible reassurance of her own identity. Their reasoning is something like: "she likes technology/computers; THEREFORE she should inject a picture of one into her arm." Which is just a weird argument when you think about it. (And it's especially weird in context of the game's association between technology and the surveillance state.)

Tattoos that memorialize particular events or entities make sense to me, like a military unit tattoo or something. Tattoos that are supposedly an expression of "who a person is / feels like" make almost no sense to me. Why would a person need or require external reminders about a fundamental part of their persona? The whole thing seems to imply that their persona is not fundamental at all, but is more like an adopted decision that gains meaning simply through arbitrary commitment (like a bad marriage), which is why they need/want a depiction of it close to them at all times and for all the world to see. It's like people are insecure about their own souls, which baffles me.

I'm willing to accept that people get tattoos for the same reason they do a lot of other things: they like the look of it. But more often than not tattoos seem, to me, to be some kind of echo chamber of identity. Any virtue which the tattoo supposedly represents should already be completely obvious to the world and to the person themselves. Shouldn't it? Therefore making the image redundant at best, and a little desperate-seeming at worst. The inky representation just rings hollow, since it's just ink--it tries to DO, to BE, and to SAY things just by going through the motions. WELL SIR, NO DICE.