Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.

The line trades on an early-20th-century association between tattooing and lives lived outside respectable middle-class norms—sailors, soldiers, prisoners, and travelers. Read this way, it suggests that bodily marks function as a kind of autobiography: visible evidence of experience, risk, and stories worth telling. It also romanticizes marginality, turning what was often stigmatized into a badge of narrative depth. Even if taken more broadly today, the aphorism implies that self-inscription (choosing to permanently mark the body) signals a person shaped by events, affiliations, or commitments strong enough to be carried for life.