Deflated balloons and tattoos

This article is published in number 14 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 5, 2022

More than the eyes, it was the tattoos that wept on that green shroud of the Palermo stadium, where the former great Italy, now Little Italy, left the scene, dragging his shoes towards the locker rooms of defeat. Beaten 1 to 0 by the unlikely North Macedonia. The stadium fell silent and the whole of Italy out of breath because of that low shot that Gigio Donnarumma dodged, fainting: count to ten before breathing. Because the inconclusive game that humiliated us for 95 minutes – small passes in midfield, shots always intercepted, boredom – was added, at the end of the game, that glance at the square meters of muscular tattoos that decorate the spherical surfaces of our players. Tattoos that had suddenly become more deflated than deflated balloons. A sudden metamorphosis of all those blue and black squiggles on the arms and red flames on the pectorals and colored streamers on the thighs and signatures on the calves and roaring tigers on the backs and sailor dedications around the neck (“Yours forever, love”) that stopped to emit the vibrations of an electric existence, to become dead leaves and rain, pure melancholy of a late winter sunset.
It is the fate of all the ritual disguises that end up revealing the pathetic they cover. From the times when the shaman, after the peyote effect, took off his feathers to go back to being the poor old man of the village. Until today, when thousands of tattooed bodies vibrate on the beaches, all believing themselves to be pirates, all disturbing princesses of something, only to become once again, as soon as they put on their slippers and shorts, quiet housewives and employees with the cooler bag on their shoulders.
The male and female human were always tattooed. From the time of Ötzi, the hunter trapped 5,300 years ago, three thousand meters high, in the Similaun glacier, with his set of 61 engraved tattoos. Lorenzo Insigne today boasts 165. Marco Verratti half. More or less the same as everyone else. Well done.

English sailors discovered them three centuries ago, landing in Tahiti and other villages in Polynesia. They spread them in Western ports among borderline relatives, a sign and stigma for eccentric travelers, prisoners, prostitutes. It became noble and secret in the aristocracies of the other century. Finally, today’s fashion for middle classes that are not entirely reflective, and teenagers who want to amaze their friend and mother. Showing the world, with those colored surfaces, that “they are not entirely empty inside”, as psychoanalysts explain, but unique, unrepeatable. Except by dint of spreading,
even the extravagance of tattooing has become so ordinary that it gets lost in the most indistinct conformity. It is Giorgio Chiellini, who has zero tattoos, today the eccentric among those involved in the millionaire kick.
With bowed heads and puffy eyes, that horde of tattooed men marching to the locker rooms screeched like chalk does on the blackboard. Transform yourself, in that last minute of lost battle, from warriors in the arena to confused retreating boys. And their muscles glistening in ink scribbles that said, “We better go to bed.”

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