Tattoos & Professional Business Appearance
Hi!
I'm Antonio Centeno, the founder of Real Men Real Style.
Today, we're going to be talking about tattoos and professional appearance.
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Okay, let's get right to the question.
"Antonio, I love your videos.
I think I've seen every last one of them."
That's a lot of videos.
"I have a question that isn't about clothing.
Do you think tattoos are inappropriate for a man who wants to appear professional?
I don't mean large, obnoxious tattoos I mean, tattoos that are under your clothing such
as on your chest, on your back, on your shoulder?
These tattoos are only seen without a shirt on.
Do you think these are inappropriate?"
This is a great question.
It's something that I know has been written about and talked about ad nauseam.
It really, to me, comes down to perception and what other people think of you because
you can be a great person and you can do everything great and you can be literally Mother Teresa,
but if you saw a picture of -- let's just use Mother Teresa.
If you saw a picture of Mother Teresa or somebody else who's a really great person out there
and they've got tattoos all over them, maybe with piercings -- and I know you didn’t
mention piercings -- you're going to have a certain impression of them and it's going
to vary from person to person.
Those of us that are maybe in the counterculture or were around people -- let's say we're in
Austin, Texas and we see a lot of tats, maybe it's not really an issue to us and we've learned
to look beyond it, but for many people, especially other parts of the world, that is something
that is just -- it has kind of a negative appeal to it.
I grew up around tattoos.
My stepfather, he had tons of tattoos on his arms and on the rest of his body that he picked
up at the Navy.
He had a lot of great stories with those tattoos, but I can tell you that the perception that
other people have had of him and those tattoos have gotten him in trouble.
Some of those tattoos, I'm not going to elaborate on them, but let's just say they -- when you
get tattoos in the '70s and you're in the Navy, they don't always have clothing on women,
so I learned a lot about the female anatomy from my stepfather's forearms.
In any case, I know that he has had to go in and have those altered because he worked
in environments in which people complained once things became more politically correct.
Now, your question is about ones that people aren't going to see, but there are going to
be times that you are going to reveal that to people.
You're going to find yourself in casual work environments in which, let's say, you have
a t-shirt on or you are going to a swimming event, and you don't even think anything of
it and you remove your shirt.
You've got to think, "Okay, what are the signals I'm sending?"
At the end of the day, if you work in a creative environment, if you have established a rapport
with your peers and they know that you deliver, it may just be something that, "Wow!
I didn’t realize he had all these tattoos.
It makes me think a little bit differently of him."
You do need to realize that there are many places in the world where it still is considered
-- my wife's Ukrainian and when she came here, she sees all these people with tattoos and
that's kind of something that people get in prison in that part of the world, and there's
a long history.
There are other places in the world where it has a religious signification.
There are other parts of the world where it just has different meanings.
Coming from a military background in the Marine Corps, everyone had an EGA tattoo on them.
I think I'm one of the few guys to get out of the Marine Corps without having the EGA
somewhere on my body.
What a lot of us don't think about and is the outside of that context, what are people
going to think?
It sounds like that you want to get some of these tattoos and you're also thinking about
your career.
If you're going to go forward with it, I like the idea of having those in places where people
aren't going to see them.
There's a great example out there.
His name is Nick Wooster.
I probably just butchered his last name, but in any case, he waited until later on in life
to get a number of tattoos on his body and he has his entire arms tattooed.
This is a guy in the fashion industry, but when he has a suit on, you cannot tell he
has any tattoos.
He doesn’t have them going up his neck.
He doesn’t have a teardrop underneath his eye, things like that where you can't hide
it.
It's interesting because whenever he wears a short sleeve shirt, all of a sudden, it
gives a very different feel.
If I saw him in a short sleeve shirt, I would just have a different perception.
I wouldn't believe that this was some guy that normally wears a suit day in and day
out, and he works very high up in corporate America.
So you just need to be aware of the perception other people are going to have of that.
Here in the United States, it has shifted quite a bit.
I mean, you see tons of women getting tattoos on their bodies.
I don't like it, but it's one of those things that it's much more accepted.
Outside of the United States, other parts of the world, it still hasn't caught on and
I don't know if it will, so be careful.
Understand that it will be sending a message, but it sounds like you're going to go about
it the right way.
I wish you the best of luck.
All right.
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Bye-bye.