tattoos

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of tattoo.

   The sailor's faded tattoos marked every port he had visited.

   Military tattoos feature marching bands, drill teams and bagpipers.

   Note

   The plural counts two quite different things: images on skin and the military kind of tattoo. The drum or bugle call and the military pageant work as both count and mass nouns, so tattoos appears when separate displays are meant, as with the August crowds at the castle. The same spelling also serves as the verb after he or she.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of tattoo.

   She tattoos clients six days a week at a studio downtown.

   Their cleanup hitter tattoos the ball whenever a pitcher leaves one over the plate.

   Note

   Three verb meanings share this form: marking skin, hitting a ball hard, and tapping out a rhythm. In the main one the object can be the person or the design (she tattoos clients; he tattoos a rose on his arm). The ball meaning is a figure of speech, as if the bat left a tattoo on the ball, and it belongs to sports talk.

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