This was an impulsive article – unlike my tattoos.
I just finished reading an article by Victoria Corindi with the aggressive title “Why I Still Think Tattoos are Trashy (author’s note: since publishing this article on Medium, Ms. Corindi has read it and quite enjoyed it, and I continue to enjoy her writing as well, even when it’s “rage bait” like this.)
It lays out the writers experiences being a person who not only has no tattoos but also is offended that her mother’s dictum that tattoos would exclude people from professional respect doesn’t seem to be the case any more.
I’m part of that trend: a white male over the age of 50, raised in a conservative Mormon family, a father and grandfather with four daughters and four grandchildren. I work as a nonprofit professional at a federation of socially and environmentally progressive organizations around Wisconsin.
And I have five tattoos.
Like the author, I’d been raised with the dictum “your body is a temple” (with the completely logical (sic) exception of pierced ears, dyed hair, and makeup — for women, “naturally”).
I remember a conversation with my conservative uncle during the beginning of my first real career, as a performance technology specialist for dance and theater companies in the early 2000’s.
I had recently had my ear pierced, and had a small yin/yang stud in it. He questioned how my clients could possibly trust my competence with such an ornament.
I pointed at his red tie and white oxford. “They trust me a lot more than they would if I showed up wearing that.”
That’s the first thing I would love to be able to point out to the non-trashy author: “professional” entirely depends upon your client base.
Let’s talk about my ink.
I didn’t get my first one until I was in my 30’s. But let’s give some context here, in the form of a short timeline:
- 1983–87 I am basically a character from the TV show Glee, discovering a love of musical theater along with a talent for it, and I resolve to earn a degree in Musical Dance Theater and move to NYC to work on Broadway. I didn’t think I’d be a star, but I knew that real people had real jobs there, and I wanted to be one of them.
- 1988 A slight detour after discovering my girlfriend was pregnant, and I enlist in the USMC infantry in order to support them and still hopefully have a chance at college after my four years are up.
- 1990 I receive an “honorable discharge under medical circumstances” after my knees, misdiagnosed for months by Navy doctors, give out. I’m sent back home to WI with my wife, two kids, and “…no job skills valid outside Croatia” according to the counselor at the first job fair I went to.
- 1992 My wife and I divorce; I get the (now four) kids, she gets the car, and I begin working in childcare: first as a cook, then a headstart teacher, then an assistant and occasional music/dance teacher. It was the only way I could afford childcare, because the schools I worked at let me bring my kids with me.
- 1996–99 When the kids all start going to public school, I have time to go to college again…and I discover a neat little program called “Inter-Arts Technology”, which explores the role of technology in art, music, and dance. In fact, it’s a degree program in the dance department.
- 1999 At the culmination of a year-long class, fourteen hours a week, with kabuki master David Furomoto, I am on stage in full authentic Kabuki makeup (which I’d been trained to put on myself) wearing a costume designed by (now Professor) Melanie Schuessler performing an original dance created for this adaptation of Yeat’s Fighting the Waves.
Eleven years after I’d had to first postpone, then give up on a dream of being a performer, not only was I doing it for a packed theater, but in the front row were my parents and my daughters. I did the entire solo dance without a mistake — even with the “fan-toss” flip the director had thrown in.
And afterwards, I decided to get my first tattoo: the makeup of the character I’d been playing, the culmination of more than a decade of work and setbacks and finally the realization of a dream.
That, my non-trashy author friend, is not “impulsive.” And yes, it is a snapshot of the person I was at that age, and yes, I’ve changed a lot since then — but believe it or not, life got a lot harder. And many times when I would be discouraged, I’d see my ink, and I’d remember: I did that. In spite of it all, I did that.
Yes. The ink is “permanent”. That’s the point. No one can take that away from me.
Each of my Other Tattoos Have Similar Significance.
I won’t go into nearly as much detail, but here’s the brief:
- I have a large logo on my back, done in a brushed-ink style, that looks like an Asian ideogram but is actually just abstract art. I got it after I was involved in a very heated ethical-conduct debate within my small professional community — during which time the team of people I worked with under the program that carried that logo very much had my back. It was a horrible time, but I will never stop being grateful for their support.
- I have a sort of labyrinth on my arm, a re-creation of the actual stone-lined path that my partner and I walked when we had our commitment ceremony fifteen years ago. I know, we could have gotten “married” and had “rings” but we really wanted something more permanent, you know? More than half of all marriages end in divorce (100% of mine, in fact) and again: regardless of what happens later, the people we were at that time, the feelings we had, and commitment we made — regardless of how optimistic or unrealistic it may have been — deserved to be honored. (Also, that’s my most visible tattoo, since I often roll up my sleeves, and I can say that I have never found it a professional disadvantage — but an excellent conversation starter at networking events).
- Back when I was a young enlisted Marine struggling to support a family of four living off-base in Oceanside, CA I didn’t have the spare cash or spare time to get any kind of service-related ink the way my brothers* did. So decades later, when I had disposable income, time, and a friend who was a tattoo artist, I finally had “USMC” tattooed on my upper bicep. Yes, it was a small part of my life now but at the time it was more than 10% of the time I’d been alive, and in those few years it changed the person I was irrevocably. This was my way of honoring that desperate young man, making so many mistakes but trying so hard.
- Finally…no, that’s enough. I have one more tattoo, but suffice it to say that it is a carefully thought out piece that I designed myself and continues to inspire deep meaning and joy every time I see it.
There you have it. So, explain to me how this ink — honoring a veteran, a committed partner, a professional willing to burn on an ethical hill, or a single parent putting himself through college — is somehow trashy?
There’s another aspect of this judgement that bothers me.
…what I feel is that I preferred a time when permanence actually meant something. — Victoria Corindi
The acquisition of my ink describes an arc of about 20 years if you’re going from the first poke to the most recent, and longer than that in terms of what inspired the ink.
In that time, my knees have gone to hell, along with a few other joints. I’ve had hernia surgery, my eyes are going bad, I’ve got a partial denture, and my hair and beard are long gone gray.
None of which I had any choice about. It just happened.
I’ve never understood why people who say “But…that’s permanent!” can’t understand that yes, that’s the point:
I have made decisions about my body that were my choice. That was a part of my skin I could control, I could do something there that, barring catastrophic injury, would be there no matter what.
Then again, I’m a cis white male. I’m used to having pretty much complete control over my body, unlike many of my friends, family, and colleagues. So when they decide — whether in retrospective commemoration or impulsive decoration — to get ink on their skin, they have that goddamn right, and nobody is entitled to an opinion on it except them and the people they value.
It’s called body autonomy, and while its days may be numbered, it is still a thing.
I fully hope to be well into my second century, coming out of the shower (slowly, creakily, possibly with the assistance of a homebot from Samsung) and catch a glimpse of the warped and creased brushed inkstrokes on my back. I expect that then — as I do now — I will smile, remembering my friends and loved ones who saw me through one of the most but far from the hardest times of my life.
Then I’ll probably put on the jumpsuit and go out to the RFK memorial health farm with the rest of the ADHDers being “healed” by taking the jobs of the long-gone migrant workers.
But my ink? It will still be there. That ink is mine.
* there were no women Marines in my unit. This was a less enlightened time…much like the current one.
