I bet you’ve had this experience too. You’re standing in the supermarket lineup or maybe the liquor store minding your business and a quite comely female standing in front of you catches your eye. No, it isn’t her looks or her cleavage.

It’s her tattoo.

My goodness, what is this world coming to? Everywhere you go now, people are sporting tattoos, especially women! Now, I’m not a dirty old man and a jagged peak covered with snow is much more likely to catch my eye than Lady Ga Ga, Or maybe a 55 Chevy, but it’s getting ridiculous out there now.

And I don’t mean sweet young things trying to make an impression with that purple dagger blade pointing right at you behind her ankle bracelet. No, I’m talking also about matronly women of a certain age sporting some blotchy, psychedelic, screamer of a tattoo that ‘s coming up from the nether regions behind the back of her dress and maybe over her shoulder and right down her arm.

Weird!

Or in some cases they can be quite subtle. Maybe on the neck, just behind the ear or nestled down the throat or the calf behind the leg. And when they wear bikinis? Well, we won’t even go there.

Not to say that you don’t still see hairy, male forearms covered with a kaleidoscope of ink and inscriptions to some lost love or maybe even dear old mom. But we’re used to that and it’s not nearly as unsettling, or even upsetting, as seeing as surreal smear of ink on some demure female creature and many times in places that we shouldn’t really be looking, but given how little some women wear these days – even in the office – well, you try to keep your eye from wondering, but even the strongest among us sometimes give in.

After seeing this phenomena time and time again, I decided to do a little research and . . . well, read on. Tattoos go back into the mists of antiquity, as far back as the Polynesians and the ancient Egyptians. “Ta” comes from the Polynesian word for striking something and ttoo from the Tahitian word “tateau,” which means to mark something.

Historians theorize that the first tattoos were probably created by accident when a stocky Neanderthal tripped over a club or a bone and scrapped his arm and then rubbed ashes or something similar on it to ease the pain and found that it left a mark on his skin.

Remember Otzi, the “Ice Man” from the Bronze Age 5,000 years ago, whose wonderfully preserved body was found in a glacier in the Austrian Alps about 10 years ago. Well guess what. His swarthy skin bore 57 tattoos, which anthropologists theorize were probably some kind of treatment for arthritis.

But it was the venerable Egyptians, more than anyone else, that were responsible for the plethora of tattoos assaulting our eyes everywhere we go today. Mummies more than 5,000 years old have been uncovered by archaeologists in ancient Thebes, which display groups of dots, and lines that were aligned in abstract geometric patterns believed to have been associated with long-forgotten ritualistic practices.

Kind of makes you wonder what kind of messages tattoo-bearing women are trying to send today.

Whatever the case, there has always been something mysterious, sinister and vaguely indecent about tattoos. The Victorians loathed them and they weren’t seen in polite company. Pirates sported them proudly, but they also had rings in their noses, ears and other places and were not exactly considered polite company.

Tattoos were a major part of North American aboriginal culture and were used to signify rank and status, especially for warriors. Young native women marked themselves with tattoos to indicate their marital status. In modern times, tattoos have been mostly associated with sailors, military men, criminals and circus carnies. But in the last decade or so, they seemed to have crossed into the mainstream for reasons that are hard to fathom.

Whatever the reason, one thing can be said for sure. Once you decide to indulge in body art there’s no easy way of turning back.