I don’t have a lot of body modifications but I have to say, getting tattooed has really helped me to accept myself. I struggle a lot with self-confidence and self-esteem and in social situations, I’m often painfully shy or very awkward. While I’ve been learning to embrace the awkward situations that are a part of everyday life, I have noticed that I’ve been more confident with myself. I’ve wanted to get tattoos for years (since I was probably 15 or 16), but I could never confidently decide on a design that I loved for longer than a month. Plus, for my first tattoo, I wanted it to be something that I would love for years and nothing really spoke to me. That was until I found an outline of a cat on Pinterest (as one does) and instantly fell in love with the design.
Since then, I’ve noticed that if my tattoo is on display in public, it becomes a bit of a conversation starter. Someone can quickly look at my tattoo and infer that I really like or love cats and that’s something we can talk about if they, too, love cats, or if they’re just complimenting the design. For someone who is sometimes extremely socially anxious, that has been a big relief. If someone’s looking at me now, my mind doesn’t instantly run through the bad scenario of, I messed up and they’re going to come over and tell me what I did wrong. Instead, I know they’re just looking at my neat tattoo. I don’t walk around staring at the ground quite as much as I used to. I now walk with my head up and smile because I have my little cat buddy to look down at.
I got my first tattoo at a time when my life was finally turning around after a long stretch of simply going through the motions to get through the day. I finally had a breakthrough and things were looking up. Now every time I look down at my tattoo, I remember how when I got it done, I was so relieved that my future was finally bright and I had all of these things to look forward to. Sometimes when I’m sad, I look down at my tattoos and both the meaning and the tattoos themselves are enough to make me smile and get back to the grind because they remind me that pain is temporary. I had to go through a lot of physical pain to get such beautiful artwork, so now if I have a day or week that just sucks, I think to myself that, just like when I was getting tattooed, this pain too is temporary and will pass.
In order to have something like my tattoos on my skin permanently, I was forced to confront my own ideas about how I appear to the world. I couldn’t just fade into the background anymore because people’s opinions on tattoos vary widely, and now that I have a tattoo, people are going to ask me about it. Being tattooed forced me to realize that while I do have control over some things, I don’t have control over everything. My body has limits of what it can and can’t do, what it’s able to do. I will never be as thin as I used to be in high school when I was exercising super regularly and playing a sport, and my tattoos forced me to realize that it’s perfectly okay to have arms that are a bit thicker because now I just have more space to decorate how I please. My body has a duty to perform of keeping me alive and in good working order and as long as I stay on top of my health by exercising and eating healthy then, just like a tattoo, I myself am a piece of art that takes a lot of time and energy to take care of.
Now I’m not saying that tattoos have miraculously cured me of all insecurities. I’ve also spent a lot of time actively working on being more confident and less negative towards myself, but they have helped me come to terms with why I have those insecurities and how to counteract them.