The Virginian-Pilot

NORFOLK, Va. – Retired Navy Master Chief T.C. Oneyear has the name and hull number of every ship he sailed on during his 30-year career tattooed on his body.

He has the traditional sailor’s tattoo of “Hold Fast” inked across the fingers of both hands. And Oneyear has crossed anchors in white gold inlays on his front teeth.

Every jab of the artist’s needle created a new memento to mark a rite of passage for the North Carolina man, who said he has about a hundred tattoos from stem to stern.

“If I had to do it all over again, would I get as many?” Oneyear asked from his Weeksville, N.C., home. “Probably not, but I would still get them.”

Not in today’s Navy he wouldn’t.

Times have changed, and the Navy is no longer on board with big body art since a few years ago when it put new restrictions on the location, number, type, size and statement that sailors and enlistees may make with their tattoos.

No ink on the head, face, neck or scalp. No tattoos that relate to gang or hate group membership. No more than five pieces, and they may not cover 25 percent or more of any body part.

And forget about the coyly kneeling naked pinup on the arm. She’s become persona non grata for enlistees in a Navy that wants to present a more professional and conservative appearance.

“Go put a swimsuit on her or something, put a dress on her or something,” said Cmdr. Glen Kaemmerer, who oversees national enlisted programs for the U.S. Navy Recruiting Command outside of Memphis, Tenn.

He said recruiting command began reviewing an increasing number of questionable tattoos that require a waiver in 2004.

With 31 Navy Recruiting Districts around the country, screening is done on the local level. Some tattoos don’t need waivers, but the recruiting command has the last word on all ink.

Sailors who had tattoos before the regulations changed were grandfathered in. However, if they want to add new tattoos, they must go through the same screening process as new enlistees.

Kaemmerer said it isn’t unusual for an enlistee to go back under the needle to alter a tattoo to make it more acceptable. Some enlistees go so far as to have them removed with a laser by a plastic surgeon or dermatologist.

The changing views on body art represents how much the Navy has changed from the days when getting a tattoo was part of being a sailor. Tattoos are a seafaring tradition that dates back centuries to when the first European sailors returned home with an indelible souvenir from the South Pacific.

Now enlistees have to explain the who, what, where, when, why and how of their body art to recruiters, who have legitimate concerns. Tattoos are used as a form of code by gangs and hate groups.

The tattoo “88” looks innocuous when taken at face value. However, law enforcement officers know it refers to the Nazi Low Riders, a white supremacist prison gang. The digits represent “Heil Hitler.” The letter “H” is the eighth letter in the alphabet.

A spiderweb tattoo on the elbow may look cool, but before it became a fashion statement, it meant the person has done prison time, murdered someone or killed another prisoner. A three-dot tattoo in the shape of a triangle has become synonymous with gangs.

Foreign language tattoos have to be translated, such as the popular Chinese and Japanese writing character tattoos that cover the bodies of professional basketball players and the pizza delivery boy.

Called “hanzi” in Mandarin Chinese, and “kanji” in Japanese, these logograms have been around thousands of years. It doesn’t matter whether the tattoo is in the Cyrillic alphabet or Ghanaian Adinkra symbols, it’s not getting a waiver unless recruiting command is sure of its meaning.

Sometimes the enlistee is the one surprised by the translation.

“We had a young man come in with two Chinese characters; it was supposed to be ‘strong’ on the left breast and ‘man’ on the right,” said Chief Petty Officer Will Borrall, spokesman for Navy Recruiting District Richmond.

Instead of “strong man,” Borrall found the hanzi characters loosely translated to “prostitute.”

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Recruiters check reference books, Internet sources and with those on staff who are fluent in foreign languages. They can’t take anything for granted, he said.

Borrall doesn’t have any tattoos, but his wife has several. He said she has a hard and fast rule about body art: “No writing unless it’s in English.”

Chief Petty Officer Kerry Turner, who is based in Raleigh, sends hanzi and kanji characters to Tian Tang, author of www.hanzismatter.com, an Internet blog that pokes fun of the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture.

“The guy is great,” Turner said. “I stumbled on the Web site and saw that another recruiter had used it. I try to figure out what it is first because I don’t want to wear the guy out.”

Tian, an Arizona State University graduate student who does the site as a hobby, didn’t plan to add Web translator to his resume. It just happened. He gets translation requests from people all the time. He receives at least three or four requests each month from recruiters.

“There are times people are just paranoid about their tattoos,” Tang said. “About 20 percent of them are actually correct; I would say 80 percent are wrong.”

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Oneyear understands the allure of the exotic. He was a middle-class kid from Dubuque, Iowa, when he joined the Navy in 1962. He has been around the world numerous times with the military and as a merchant marine.

He is amused at young people who get foreign language tattoos just because they like the way they look.

“They like to see their name in a different language even though they can’t read it,” he said.

However, a tattoo shouldn’t be the reason why the Navy turns away a would-be recruit, Oneyear said. “I don’t think a tattoo has anything to do with a person’s ability to do their job.”

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(c) 2006, The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.).

Visit Pilot Online, the World Wide Web site of the Virginian-Pilot, at http://www.pilotonline.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

AP-NY-03-12-06 0600EST

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