I worked with a bloke who was THEE most straight-laced, button-up dude you've ever met. Only sike, no he wasn't, that was just a carefully curated facade. He was actually a super cool dude who owned several snakes and who went overseas to get gay-married YEARS before it was legalised here - and he was COVERED in tattoos. He wore a dress shirt with slacks and a tie every single day, and he had to wear a long-sleeved top under his shirts whenever he wore a white one, so that his tattoos didn't show through the fabric.
We worked with this woman who was great, but VERY old-school. One day, tattoos came up and I mentioned that the only reason I don't have one is because my attention span is too short-lived to commit to having something permanently on my skin; I would love it for a few years and then I would be over it and would wish I'd gotten something else.
She launches into this whole speech-slash-rant, begging me not to get a tattoo, telling me that I'll regret it, telling me that only degenerates get tattoos.
Tattoo-guy, who kept his tats VERY much on the downlow because the job he was in would have frowned upon them, says something along the lines of, "oh, RIGHT? Honestly, the rise in tattoos in today's youth is something society aught to be ashamed of."
I start grinning, because I know about his tattoos, and I know he's taking the piss, but old-school-colleague does NOT know. She's like "Ah! An ALLY!!" and launches into an even more impassioned rant.
He joins her - matches her energy perfectly. Throws in a few lines about how "you know, in Japan, if you have a tattoo it means you're a CRIMINAL" and other such juicy bits. Meanwhile, as he's talking, he's taking off his jacket, unbuttoning the cuffs on his shirt, revealing the white long-sleeved top underneath. He waits for an opportune moment -- she was half way through a staunch sentence about Just What She Would Do If Her Son Ever Came Home Tattooed, and he pushes his long-sleeve all the way up to his elbow, revealing his many, many tattoos.
I shit you not, the sound she made lives rent-free in my head. Absolutely screamed in horrified shock; turns around and shields her eyes, the whole thing. I'm pissing myself laughing at this point, and so is tattoo-guy. He rolls up his other sleeve just in time for her to manage to gather herself and turn back around, only to be faced with his second tattooed forearm, and she screams again and turns away.
The shrieking was mostly due to her own embarrassment, not that she genuinely couldn't look at the tattoos -- it was that she'd realised she'd gone on this absolutely passionate rant about the inherent degenerate nature of anyone who gets a tattoo...... to her very highly esteemed co-worker, who was a walking artpiece under his starched white shirt, and she was MORTIFIED.
He wasn't offended, though -- he was laughing just as much as I was, ABSOLUTELY delighted to have been able to set up and execute his little prank -- and it wasn't long before she saw the funny side of it too and was laughing with us, HEARTILY embarrased, but in addition to it being genuinely hilarious, I suspect it might also have given her reason to, you know, not judge people with tattoos so uniformly? Or to go on fewer impassioned rants about how much she hates tattoos, at the very least.
