ANSWER: If the basketball season, and March Madness indicates anything, the Kennett Square will be resplendent in tattoo artistry.

Life is often a matter of observation, and perspective. Young people today laugh at yesterday's basketball players in their short pants. We older people observe today's crop running down the court, their britches flapping, the multifarious hair-dos, bristling with tattoos, and it reminds us of a fully bedecked gypsy caravan caught up in a windstorm.

Tattoos were once considered an aberration reserved for people disconnected from the norm. It was the type of thing some soused up kid would do, away from home, and so inebriated he could be cajoled into trying anything.

People used to either laugh at tattoos, or avert their eyes to prevent undue embarrassment. The result was that many of the tattoos were hidden away. Guys gave up swimming because taking off their shirts meant revealing a fire eating dragon. Some were reluctant to wear shorts, because the left leg might depict last year's girlfriend posing semi-nude.

Suddenly -- and suddenly is the right word in this whimsical world -- tattoos have achieved a certain respectability.

Tattoos should not be confused with fads, or fashion. Fad and fashion are subject to endless changes, and always will be.

Not so many years ago a fellow who didn't have a G.I. haircut just wasn't with the program. Then came the duck-tail, and later on stringy locks flowing mournfully over the shoulders. Shaved heads have had their day for guys growing bald anyhow. Now it's the spiked jag look, as if the man has had a dramatic encounter with static electricity.

Men have worn felt hats, and three piece suits, pants with cuffs, pants without cuffs, and back to pants with cuffs. They have worn Nehru jackets, leisure suits, tank tops, skin tight pants, designer jeans, faded floppy jeans, brilliant polyesters, and sometimes cut-off jeans so that strings can dangle from the ends.

Women would seem to have surpassed anymore possible changes.

Although it would have been a perfect place to hatch their eaglets, there was a time when women wore their hair piled on their heads like a mountain peak where no full grown eagle would dare to fly.

Women have bobbed their hair, frizzed it, ironed it, curled it, and in the process have displayed a color range from the pastels to a blazing prismatic glory.

Women's skirts have alternated up and down from scandalously short to drooping around their ankles, mid-Victorian. They have painted their legs, covered them in tan hose, black hose, white hose, gold hose, pink hose, flaming red hose, and sometimes have adorned them in art-deco design to challenge the imagination.

Now a number of young girls like to show up with that third world poverty look, wearing pitifully ragged jeans with holes in the knees, while exposing the remains of the umbilical cord.

There has never been a generation -- nor will there ever be -- that hasn't looked at some old pictures and howled with laughter at what they used to wear, or what they once considered the coolest thing possible.

Tattoos don't belong in the categories of fads, or fashion. Unless a drastic move is made to remove them they will be there 10 years from now -- 30 years from now. They will be there when they could be laughed at again. Worst of all -- they will be there when some future generation might consider them wretched relics of the past, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and basketball players wore short pants. Tattoos are not fads.

Getting serious for a moment: There are three ways to have tattoos removed:

1. Laser surgery that gradually lightens the tattoo. It requires multiple treatments, and must be done by a dermatologic surgeon, or a physician trained in lasers.

2. Dermabrasion -- involves "sanding" the skin to remove the tattoo's surface and middle layers. You may be left with a scar.

3. Surgical excision -- with the surgeon using a scalpel to cut out the tattoo, and sew up the wound.

All of these procedures involve time, money and a certain amount of pain, and all are subject to the size, and amount of color in the tattoo.

Insurance coverage may be made available, but this varies under certain conditions, and depends on communication between the doctors and the insurance companies.

Tattoos have been around for a long time. Their acceptance is based on the mores of one culture to the other. If they are to be the wave of the future, then it will happen. But in the meantime young people should not take this step lightly.