You should absolutely get all the silly tattoos you want!

On stick and poke tattoos and self expression

Before I turned eighteen, I told my mother multiple times that I wanted to get a tattoo as soon as I could—one that meant something, I assured her; I wouldn’t just permanently put anything on my skin. It took a while for me to decide on the perfect tattoo, and in July 2020 I finally ended up gracing my skin with its first permanent artistic display: my grandmother’s handwriting. After that, I got a burst of tattoo fever! I’d opened the box and now my brain was swarming with ideas of things I desperately wanted to get tattooed—unfortunately tattoos aren’t that cheap, and I couldn’t really spare the money for it. 

In February 2021, I got tired of thinking I wanted to do it and not doing it, so I messaged my close friend who is a tattoo artist and had him teach me how to stick and poke. From that moment on, I spent almost all of my free time tattooing random or meaningful little things on myself. My tattoos now include a range of things, from symbols of the most important relationships in my life to a silly joke from Australian absurdist comedy group, Aunty Donna. 

My body began filling up with tattoos, some more polished, some less, and I began loving it so much more. 

When I started to do this, I sent my mother a photo of my first tattoo and said something along the lines of “by the way, I’m stick and pokin’ myself now!” I assume she saw a mental film reel of all the times she’d told me she didn’t want me to cover myself in piercings and tattoos, shrugged it off and typed back, “Doesn’t it hurt?” 

A few months later, she even let me give her a small tattoo—my mother, who had spent fifty years saying she would never ever get a tattoo, let me draw a tiny, permanent music note on her to symbolise her love for music. 

My tattoos are a part of who I am: they’re not a bad decision I’m going to regret someday, but an expression of what I have inside. They’re not all thoroughly thought out, meaningful tattoos—in fact, most of them aren’t. Most of them I’ve done on a whim, or while I was a little bored as I watched a show or a movie; a couple are things my friends and I found funny; a lot of them are just things that make me smile. 

Whether they’re a sentence in one of my favorite actors’ handwriting or some stars I doodled in permanent ink during a virtual game night with some friends, all of my tattoos are an important expression of the person I am: I like stars and hearts and clouds, so I drew some; I want to remember my friend who passed, so I wrote down an inside joke he and I used to share; I like Psycho (not the remake, never the remake), so I tattooed a bloody knife that still earns a little grimace from my mom. 

I never gave much thought to my newfound love of tattooing myself until a session with my therapist in which she brought them up in regards to the subject of identity and self-expression. She’d zeroed in on my tattoos since our first meeting, seeing them for what they were before I ever did—one of the loudest and most obvious ways for me to express myself, to present myself to the world and say, “Look, this is who I am.” 

She helped me realise that I have a strong sense of who I am and I feel very passionate about things and people, so much so that it only seems right for that passion to spill and overflow and seep through my skin in the form of a tattoo. 

Every tattoo has a story, be it the long story about one of my best friends and I that lies behind the 29 on my ankle, the shorter one behind the words from one of my favorite arias to hear Juan Diego Flòrez sing or the inconsequential one behind a tattoo I gave myself right after having finished another one, simply because I had a bit of ink left. Every tattoo is a part of who I am and an expression of my identity, and the little to no thought that goes behind a majority of them is part of that identity, and I’m proud of it. I’m proud to have a tattoo on my wrist that says this is my wrist and never fails to get a laugh, just as I’m proud of the small nonbinary symbol on my ankle that warms my heart whenever I see it, because it makes my gender identity a part of me as visible as the freckles on my face or the color of my eyes. 

To me, tattooing myself is like taking a part of myself, small or big, and putting it on display as clear as day; it’s an act of self-acceptance and self-love, perhaps one of the biggest ones I’ve ever practiced. 

How many times have I felt embarrassed of an interest I have, worried I talked about it too much and bored people with it? Now those interests are on my skin for everyone to see, so that you don’t even need to wait until we have a conversation to find out about how much I like Spider-Man, thanks to the very convenient tattoo dedicated to Miles Morales on my right arm! 

My tattoos are a fundamental part of me and I couldn’t be happier with them, even the shakier or sillier ones, because they’re all me. 

Not everyone loves covering themselves in small, often silly or jokey tattoos as much as I do; some express themselves just as loudly through clothing, hairstyles or a seemingly excessive number of pins on their denim jackets—but no matter what form it manifests itself in, self-expression is crucial and incredibly beautiful. 

There are few acts braver than showing ourselves to people, whether we know them or not, and there’s an incredible relief and freedom that comes with unleashing and expressing our true identity, uncaring of whether people like it or not. There is beauty in letting ourselves be seen.