By John Plue
As tattoos become more accepted into every day society, more opinions are surfacing regarding them. One of the most common dilemmas among the tattoo world is whether tattoos should be meaningful or not.
I understand why someone would want a meaningful tattoo. It is a piece of work that will be on their body until they either get it removed, covered up, or they die. Not many would want a tattoo on themselves if they didn’t like it.
Tattoos do not need to be meaningful, they can be whatever one wants. Not everything has to have a reason behind it. That’s not how life works in general so why should art work like that?
That’s not to say that tattoos should be taken lightly. Sometimes it’s easy to find the right tattoo. One day you could walk into a tattoo shop, see the best tattoo template you have ever seen, and get it later that day. Other times, it can take days, weeks, months, or even years to find the right tattoo that best suits you and your tastes.
Personally, I have only one meaningful tattoo out of the three that I have gotten. It happens to be the most recent tattoo that I have gotten. It’s a fountain pen on my left forearm. It represents my love for writing and it’s on my left because I am left handed. The other tattoos that I got are mirrored mountains and a uniform with a rainbow mane, there is no other reason that I got them besides that they look nice.
My first tattoo idea had changed over the years, giving me time to think about all the possibilities of what I wanted to put on my body. The time let me perfect the idea in my head and find the right tattoo artist, which is almost as important as finding the right tattoo.
The right artist can mean a lot of things for tattoos. They can help you tweak the design and even give you pointers on what may work well and what doesn’t. It is also best to find an artist that does the style you want. If an artist you used before doesn’t do a certain style then find another one that does. Don’t settle with one artist if they can’t do everything you want them to.
The debate on whether tattoos should be meaningful is a useless on. It is another way for people to try to police how other people treat their bodies. Which, honestly, is a whole other topic of conversation. People should be free to choose what they put on their bodies. It is their body, that’s the whole point. Even if it is not meaningful to you, or not meaningful at all, not your body, not your problem.