nutshell said:
I often wonder about girls/women who get tatoos on their lower backs. From an evolutionary standpoint where nature wants the species to continue, do these tatoos perhaps represent fertility and call a male's attention to the hips and a$$ of the woman, luring him to mate with her?
You mean the way that a female baboon's a$$ turns bright red when she's in estrus?
nutshell said:
I think that tattoos are just a more radical form of body decoration in general, from makeup and jewelry to high-heels and push-up bras to colored contact lenses and hair coloring to piercings and ink to cosmetic surgery. And I think that while body decoration may have originally started as an attempt to attract a mate it moved beyond that long ago.
I am often struck by the sense that women dress more to impress other women within their peer group than to impress men. (And I'm talking about straight girls here.) Honestly, does your average straight male care whether a woman is wearing Prada or Versace? The guys I know notice how short a skirt is (assuming that the legs are nice to look at), not what label is on the skirt. When women plunk down the big bucks for those labels, are they hoping to impress a man or their friends and co-workers?
Similarly I think that with lower back tattoos, while it may have started a something to increase sex-appeal to men, what it is now is a status symbol (depending on the crowd you aim to impress).