Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! No, that’s not the sound of Shia Lebeouf’s Bumblebee, which actually doesn’t sound like a bumblebee at all. That’s the sound of a tattoo gun waiting to touch your skin and torture you for the next couple of hours.
There are just as many people with tattoos here at Georgia Southern as there are people in line at Chick-fil-A in the Union every morning.
Tattoos aren’t just decorations, they’re declarations. With alternative fashions and lifestyles such as tattoos and body modifications on the rise. Every couple of week Her Campus selects one lucky student with a unique tattoo and features him or her in the blog. For the first ever Tattoo of the Week piece, we have our very first winner, Georgia Southern’s very own Samantha Watson, a junior art major with a lot of art both in her portfolio and on her skin. With a couple of tattoos here and there, the tattoo that caught Her Campus’s eye the most would have to be the set of water droplets on this young lady’s feet.
Name: Samantha Watson
Age: 21
Major: Art
Hobbies: Drawing, painting, drinking, getting tattooed
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
How many tattoos do you have? 5
Where did you get your tattoos done? Ghost Town Ink, Portland, Oregon; Liberty Tattoo, Atlanta, Georgia; Sunken Ship Tattoo, Seattle, Washington
“Raindrops are fallin’ on my feet” is what 21-year-old Samantha Watson should be singing instead of BJ Thomas’s classic “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” What seems to be just a couple of drops of water on her feet means more to Samantha Watson than anything else in the world. And her world was her sister, Shianne Watson.
Samantha was 14-years-old at the time when her little sister Shianne Watson died of cancer in 2007. The sisters loved to play in the rain. That was what Samantha remembers Shianne the most by. For them, the announcement of rain by the weatherman was the equivalence to Christmas. “Whenever it rained, my sister and I would run outside barefoot and jump into puddles and do the silliest things imaginable,” said Watson. “Our parents would get so mad whenever we came home soaking wet,” Watson giggled.
Miss Watson has four other tattoos: a globe, a Buddhism piece, an anarchy rose, and a black star, but this is her absolute favorite tattoo. These beautiful blue splashes on her feet are the perfect representation of her love and nostalgia for Shianne. Samantha first came up with the idea of this tattoo about a year after her sister passed, and as soon as she turned 18-years-old, she dashed to a popular tattoo shop in her small hometown (Ghost Town Tattoo) and started her far-from-over journey of body modifications.
The tattoos have splashes of blue with a hint of green on the edges. Samantha’s artist Ashley P. of Ghost Town Tattoo tops it all off by adding a few finishing touches of white ink to give it its wet, 3D effect.
Dealing with the loss of a loved one is always hard. Samantha admitted that for awhile, she found it difficult to step outside when it rained because the mere memories of being in the rain with her sister would break her heart. Over time, she grew stronger, and Shianne grew with her. And today, Samantha says with a smile “even though she’s gone, she’s still with us, she just hangs out with me in the form of rain now.”