It’s not always easy being a girl with tattoos. The moment we decide to expose our body to ink, we become disappointing to some people, which is why a whole lot of us are not a stranger to confused or disgusted looks by strangers, or long, condescending talks from family about all the awful things a tattoo says about a girl. They usually hit us with ‘girls shouldn’t get tattoos, it’s ugly’ or ‘who’s going to want to hire a girl with tattoos?’ as if their degrading insults bare any influence in our decision to tatt ourselves up. The worst part is that most folks make it seem as though we’re somehow going against traditional values of femininity and what it means to be a proper, well-adjusted girl when we get a tattoo. OK, and?
A tattoo on someone’s body shouldn’t be grounds to insult. Regardless of what most people think, tattoos are always personal. Whether it’s a heart on an ankle or a slice of pepperoni pizza on a finger, it has personal meaning. No one should possess the ability to hurt you because you chose to get a piece of artwork on your body for the rest of your life and allowed it to tell a story about who you are.
The fact that there are so many girls out there right now with tattoos says a lot about female empowerment. It says that we’re confident in ourselves, that we don’t depend on traditionalist values to define us or anyone for that matter. It means that we don’t waver in our beliefs because we know how strong we are, how valuable we are. We also don’t need anyone to tell us that a tattoo downgrades our looks because we know we’re sexy as hell with or without.
So, it sucks that most people won’t take a minute and just try to understand our point of view. We aren’t asking that you change your mind. We get it, you seem to be pretty fixed in your way of thinking. But that doesn’t give you the right to put us down because it’s your own personal belief that girls with tattoos go against the status quo. It’s your status quo, not ours. Just because you think differently than we do, it doesn’t make you right. In fact, it kind of makes you wrong…in this case, anyway. I mean, considering how many of us have tattoos, I think we’ve made it pretty clear that the faulty opinions of others don’t plague us.
But either way, many of you have yet to realize that we could care less about how our tattoos offend you. It’s our body, it’s our choice. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt when someone questions our femininity or tells us that our tattoos are not lady-like, because it does. It shouldn’t, but it does. We’re still working on that. It might take some time but we’ll get there. We can promise you that.