You bring up three good points.  I too like to look at them with some degree of fascination.  Most of my looking is at the magazine shop because I have no one in my life to look at the real things and you can't pull a stranger aside and ask for a long evaluating look.

As for the removal part.  They cannot be removed without residual markings.  The pigment of the tatoo is made of metals and metal oxides and is lodged into the basal cell layer of the dermis.  It stays because these cells do not exfoliate like the more superficial epithelial cell layers.

I too, being older perhaps, remember those hipppie days and what we used to do that bugged the establishment.  But now things have changed and so have I and I wouldn't do now what I did then.  Fortuantely for me none of what I did then was irreversible.  I also clearly remember a friend of my fathers telling me about the tatoo that he got while in the Navy.  He was not pleasedd about the decision he'd made when he was young.

One last thing.  I'm not sure that the pain is necessarily an undesired thing for some of these people.  Piercings?  What many never hear about are the infections that got out of control and the resulting scars from the skin grafts. I know of one case of a 3 month hospital stay and eventual loss of the limb from a necrotizing faciaitis.

Sometimes fun can be a real downer.

A good friend of mine got a tatoo of the Zig Zag man when he was 18 years old. Lots of people were getting tatoos, and it was relatively small and on his arm. A few years later, he quit smoking pot, quit drinking, and became a health nut. Worked out alot, ran a marathon, became a responsible father.  He changed. Wonder what his kids think of his tatoo?

Nothing wrong with getting a tatoo. But think long and hard about the consequences, and whether you will want it there twenty years from now.  And yes, I have a small tatoo as well. Not ashamed of it and have no desire to get it removed. Also no desire to get another one. But that's me. We are all entitled to make our own decisions, no matter how juvenile or stupid they may seem many years from now.

Personally,

I think that they are very sexy if not overdone, and I find them erotic. That's my taste...

Sadly as you can see from my pics.. I am already um... Well I wouldn't say flabby ... but then I try to be nice to myself.  LMAO

Skin bounces back with care as weight flucuates... as for the pain.. it is kinda like getting an intentional sunburn.... altho the pain goes away quickly.

I waited until I was 27 to get my first... and I love my body art... I have a daughter and I constantly hear "What will you do if she wants ink?"  And all I can say is that I will tell her to wait.  NO ink until over 18.  You need to be sure what you want on your person!

Rebecca