Jesus is modern
Jesus’s face is tattooed here against an upper arm of someone who must have thought that Jesus was modern. It is certainly one of the more unique Jesus tattoos that I’ve seen. The face is drawn against a soft background, with the details patterned on afterwards in a series of circles that act as pixels – in a dot-matrix fashion. Dot matrix is how older printers used to draw text and images – in an table of pixels. The unnecessary largeness of each pixel immediately leads one to think "retro technological", a popular style found in the fashion industry.
I’d like to think that the person wearing this Jesus tattoo wants to tell everyone that he doesn’t think that Jesus and Christianity is a collection of dusty scriptures written in a land and time that are not our own. I think that this modern imagery of Jesus’s face here is telling us that Jesus is timeless. Jesus Christ’s lessons and his actions in his own time are cool and hip even now, in a very basic sense. He is “cool” now not because of his death on the cross, but rather the ideas that he had. His lessons were something for the future, not a relic of the long forgotten past. In that sense, Jesus then was much more modern than we are now – even now.
