As part of the oral tradition that was finally written down in the Talmud, Moses provided the principles by which the commandments could be modified, changed or eliminated. For example, all of the laws requiring human cleanliness, in the Red Heifer sense, have been eliminated today because a Red Heifer has not existed for well over almost two thousand years and all of us are unclean. Besides the Temple does not exist anyway.

Now I cannot remember the principles. So I cannot say if tattoos would now be acceptable. But since a tattoo makes you unclean, according to scripture, and since we are all unclean, my guess is that a very large number of the 613 commandments can be eliminated, including the tattoo one.

By the way, one of the ways to eliminate all the commandments is for the Messiah to come and give us new ones. Christianity is correct in this sense, except that Jesus said apecifically that we have to keep all the old commandments, plus a few others like 'love your enemy' that he introduced.

yanniru