“What’d you do this weekend?” A friend of mine asked me after a long weekend of heavy drinking, sleeping in, and eating everything in sight. “I got a Tattoo!” I replied. Apparently it wasn’t the answer he was looking for. One eyebrow slowly rose and his head tilted to one side; almost like a puppy with that look of “I know you’re talking to me, it sounds important, but I don’t understand.” That wasn’t the response I was expecting to my admission. The extrovert side of me wanted my friend to be overly excited and demand to see my new work.
Could it be that the act of decorating my body with a work of art is still such a foreign idea to people? Our sports heroes proudly display their works of art during every game that we watch. Steven Slivka who writes for The Rebel Yell, a college newspaper in Nevada, estimates that 70 percent of NBA players have tattoos! Even NFL and NHL players are heavily tattooed. These voluntary changes to their bodies don’t make us sit back any further in our seats during the spectacular plays on the field that almost defy the laws of physics… no! We’re at the edge of our seats watching, in almost slow motion, the ball float through the air and land into the hands of this god of sports who somehow just leapt inhumanly high into the air to pluck the ball from the sky. When he does his funky little victory dance, we see his tattoos glisten in the lights of the stadium. The tattoos haven’t changed this man into something different. He’s still our hero for the night! So why, when I told my friend that I now had a tattoo, did I get a look like I was from another planet?
As I continued through the week, that thought stuck in my mind. Why was I treated differently all of a sudden because of my tattoo? My eyes searched the world around me, trying to find clues as to what had happened to me. Tattooed or not, I started to notice something. People with darker clothes and long dark hair (the goth’s), were given a wide path to walk down the sidewalks on campus, almost as if they were contagious. A few people with rainbow gay pride buttons on their backpacks received second glances and hushed whispers as they went out of ear-shot. A heavily pierced girl with orange hair actually had people stop and stare as she walked down the sidewalk. Each of these people decided to change their appearance in ways both subtle and obvious. Moreover, they were all treated differently because of how they portrayed themselves to the world. Something I had read from a tattoo artist came into my mind, “They’re not freaks, they’re just like you and me.” Gregor Glinski was talking about people he had worked with over the years, in his book Masters of Tattoo. These people that I observed weren’t freaks from another world; they were normal people, only expressing themselves differently.
I’m proud of my tattoo, and look at it as another part of what makes me who I am. I asked one of my friends, Dustin Hiersekorn, if he had encountered anything negative from his tattoos, he told me “No. if anything it’s more of a conversation starter. Like at work, people will ask what my forearm tattoo means.” I hope I’ll have that type of opportunity. I’ll never be a sports hero that you breathlessly watch on TV, but I can still be a positive and memorable influence on the world around me. I am not my tattoo; I am a normal guy who happens to have a tattoo that means something to him. Speaking for the majority of the tattooed population, we’re not freaks from another world, we’re just like you. When you see someone with a work of art on their body, take a moment and ask them about it. You might realize you’re not as different from them as you previously thought. You may even realize that you’re not so alone in this big scary world either.
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