Tattoos & Thoughts

Tattoos are a hard thing to describe for me, why I get them, what they mean. It all has to do with my not yet finished life story. When I was little, I lived in Wisconsin, and I-from what I can recall-was very happy and satisfied with life. Then I moved to Iowa and then I became insecure. I moved here around the age where everyone had their cliques and group of friends, so I was naturally a castaway. I didn’t have many friends and any friend that I found, it seemed like my brother somehow stole their attention because he was better in a sense. I’ve felt like this up until I graduated high school, and even a little bit after that until I got my first tattoo, which were the wings that I drew. I absolutely adore them. They signify my ‘coming of age’ and my love for the world outside of boundaries. They also signify my love for running and that freeing feeling that I get when I run, it is almost if my feet can take me anywhere that I want to go. I want to fly through life but not speed through it or stumble through it. It is to signify that I made it through the hard times, and it even got to the point where my wings meant so much to me that they made me feel like me.

I’ve always had this feeling that I am living someone else’s life, that I am not really living, and this because of the shit that I’ve been going through. Don’t fret friends, I don’t think like that as much as I did before and that is quite amazing. I never thought I would get this far. The tattoos that I have and will get are things that I honestly believe will be true my whole life, hence the tattoo. It is hard to describe but I want them on my body to help myself realize that I need to be myself in a way. It is almost like a reminder that I need to be true to myself and don’t change for others. The tattoos that I get are for me and not for anyone else, they all represent something that I love and have loved for a long time, and by long time I mean as far back as I can remember. They make me feel like the body that I am in is my own and that I am not trapped in someone else’s because sometimes I feel like I control how I do things and I don’t want to feel that way again, and I haven’t unless I really get stuck in the metaphorical mud of sadness, and I’m so glad it’s mud because it used to be quicksand.

Some many people have helped me just by being in my life, the people I worked with at Palmer’s and I am so grateful for the people I work with at Stuff etc. It’s absolutely amazing and I can’t reiterate it enough. I love working there and it makes me feel like I am who I am. I am a people person, and I felt like I wasn’t ever able to perceive that before, but I started changing when I got out of high school and started doing things that I wanted to do. Getting tattoos that I want in order to make me feel at peace or at my center may be bad, it may the incorrect way of thinking as well, but the way I see it. It is the incorrect way for others to judge why I get them in the first place, we all have our morals and we don’t like when others judge them. I just wish I was better with spoken word so I could explain myself properly.

I mean, the best way to say why I get tattoos is because they make me feel like myself, people take that in different ways, and sometimes don’t understand it. It’s hard to make others understand but sometimes they just can understand, and that will be okay.