Moving back to the contiguous 48 states after living in Hawaii for a year was odd for a number of reasons. It was strange not having the beach 5 minutes down the road, it was odd to not be swimming in the ocean at sunset every evening. While the warms nights were still present in Alabama when I first got there, by the time October or November rolled around I missed being able to sit outside after dark in a tank-top and board shorts. One thing that I didn’t expect to seem odd was the lack of tattoos.
Tattoos are everywhere in Hawaii, and it’s completely normal. You see big-time business men with their tattoo sleeves sticking out of their aloha shirts, and 70 year old uncles with chest pieces. Tattoos are a huge part of the Hawaiian culture, and don’t have the same negative stigma as they do in many places in the world. It goes back centuries and is much more deeply engrained than I would be able to explain. It is a big part of many of the island cultures in the Pacific. In those cultures, the tattoos tell stories. They show the celebrations, they show the low points. They are worn to honor children, parents, families. They represent more than just the skill of a talented artist, they show the life and history of the one that wears it.
It was with this in mind that I started getting tattoos. I wanted constant reminders of the highs and lows of my life. I wanted to be able to look at my body and remember everything that I’ve been through. I wanted stories to be told. The stories that make me who I am, the stories that have gotten me to this point: 28 and loving the life that I’m living despite whatever things have torn me down or gotten in the way.
With all of this in mind, I decided to start telling those stories through a small series of written posts. A series that will likely grow as my life goes on and I find more stories worth immortalizing on my skin.
The first I want to mention is my most recent. It is also one of the most basic, minimal, and obscure tattoos that I have if you don’t know anything about my family. I saw the idea somewhere on the internet and liked it.
If you don’t know this already, I am the sixth of ten children in my family. If I had one or two siblings I’m sure I could figure out something significant enough to get a very detailed tattoo representing both of them. But my parents made it much more difficult (because I’m sure they were thinking about my tattoos when they decided to have a big family). So I went for dots.
This tattoo is a line of dots, and one open circle. Five dots (representing my five older siblings), and then the open circle (me), followed by the other four dots (younger siblings, in case you didn’t already pick up on that theme). Something simple, and easy to explain, that could potentially be copied by my siblings, if that’s something they wanted.