Skin and Ink

Emily Burr ’15, Max Crawford ’15 and Josh Morrison ’17 have had theirs for a little over a year. Maxson Jarecki ’16 and Jane Pritchard ’15 have had theirs for three. Yet long before a tattoo artist ever set needle to skin, however, all five students had been carrying the words and images now etched on their bodies in the back of their minds.

Burr has the words “However improbable” inked in black on her right rib. They are taken from the well-known Sherlock Holmes maxim: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” In fact, even the design of the tattoo is taken from a photocopied page of “The Strand,” the magazine in which Conan Doyle originally published his Sherlock Holmes stories.

“Basically, since seventh grade, I’ve been obsessed with Sherlock Holmes — the books and the good movies that are made,” Burr said. She later added that she thought about the tattoo for “a solid two years” before actually getting it.

The intended meaning of the quotation is clearly a commentary on the nature of deduction, Burr said. For her, however, having the tattoo also serves as a reminder that “improbable” is not “impossible.”

“People mistake improbable things for impossible things a lot, and it’s sort of a reminder to not do that,” she explained.

Crawford has the letters “S O P A A D” and “U T I U A D” in all caps on the inside of his left forearm. The letters run vertically down toward his wrist, six letters on either side of a dividing line, and they make up initialisms that stand for three phrases: “Shadows of perfection,” “Awake and dreaming,” and “Until time itself unravels and dissipates.”

“It’s been in the making since freshman year of high school,” Crawford said. That is when he wrote the first phrase, “Shadows of perfection,” and began writing it on himself in pen.

“They’re three phrases that embody certain ideals I want to live by,” he said. “The first one, in a word, is about history. It represents my struggle with depression and also my family’s struggle — so staying in touch with your past and your blood and knowing who you are.” He later added: “ ‘Shadows of perfection’ means that nothing is perfect.”

“The second one, ‘Awake and dreaming,’ stands for hope — keep trying to be better, live better, do better, because you can be better,” Crawford said. “And the last phrase, ‘Until time itself unravels and dissipates,’ just means some things are eternal, including the previous two phrases.”

Morrison has three tattoos. The first one he got was the phrase “Que Será, Será.” with the words, in Garamond, stacked three-high on his right rib. “Que será, será” is Spanish for “Whatever will be, will be” and was popularized as a saying by the 1956 song of the same name.

The second one is the words “Live fast die young be wild and have fun” connected by jagged lines that mimic the waveforms of an electrocardiogram. The sentence, a line from Lana Del Rey’s “Ride,” runs from just beneath Morrison’s right shoulder to the back of his upper arm. The third is a compass that sits on his back, right below his neck.

“I always knew that I wanted a tattoo most definitely,” Morrison said. “My dad has 18 — so he’s going crazy with it — but from that I knew that I definitely wanted one.”

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“Que será, será” is something one of his best friends always said to him during his difficult senior year of high school, according to Morrison, and when he saw a tattoo of the phrase while browsing online one day, the idea of adding the ink to his own body clicked.

Morrison sees the meaning of his second tattoo as this: “Life is only so long, and you’re only going to have so many chances and so many opportunities, and so the ‘Live fast, die young’ part is sort of like, take the chances you get because you may not get them again,” he said. “And then the ‘Be wild, have fun’ part, that’s just all about doing what you want to do and not being guided by forced standards or forced guidelines, just being your own individual person and whatever you want that to be.

He noted that some people see “Die young” and are taken aback. For him, however, it is the overall message and not the literal directive that is important.

Morrison’s most recent tattoo is a compass rose complete with letters representing the four cardinal directions. He got it with one of his best friends, who also got a compass tattooed on her upper back, though hers is of a different design.

“It sort of has two different meanings for me,” Morrison explained. The first, which has to do with the fact that he and his friend have matching tattoos, is a reminder that “regardless of where we are or what’s going on in our lives or the people we’re surrounded with, we’ll always find our way back to each other, as cheesy as that may sound.”

The second, more individual meaning, Morrison said, is “about having your own compass. It’s sort of similar to my second one — to let your own desires and passions and interests be what guide you and to let that be your compass and give you the direction you need.”

Jarecki has a loon floating in water inked on the instep of his right foot. Every summer for the past 12 years, he has spent two months traveling via wood canvas canoe through northwest Ontario with Keewaydin Canoe Camp. He spent eight years as a camper, and next summer will be his fifth year leading a trip. The design is taken from the picture of a loon in the bottom-right corner of the map that campers use when they’re canoeing and portaging through the Canadian wilderness.

“The loon is an animal that’s up there, and it’s kind of the soundtrack to these trips and to the way of life up there,” Jarecki said. “The kind of person I am when I’m existing in the natural world — that’s the most important thing for me.”

Pritchard has a rose on her left wrist. It is no ordinary rose, however; tucked away in its folds is the number 65, and in one of the gaps between petals is the name of her sister, Nell.

Pritchard’s sister has cystic fibrosis. Pritchard recounted how the phrase “65 Roses,” a nickname for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, was born after a young patient who with the disease misheard his doctor’s diagnosis as “65 roses.” The Foundation’s nickname formed the basis of a design drawn up by a local artist.

“Back in high school, my sister started getting sick. We do a lot of fundraising, so one thing we did was we had this local artist design these necklaces,” Pritchard said. “The artist came up with this design that I now have on my wrist. It’s a rose with a 65 in the middle.”

Some of the students intend to get more tattoos. Morrison is planning to get a matching tattoo with his sister on her 18thbirthday. Crawford has four tattoo ideas on the “back burner” and said that he thinks he’ll end up getting at least two of them. Jarecki, on the other hand, firmly believes that his loon is the first and last tattoo he will ever get.

Many of them cited ease in covering their tattoos with clothing as a factor in their decisions regarding the placement of their ink.

“Definitely I thought a lot about location, in terms of both how it’d look as I got older and also just how easy it’d be to hide,” Burr said.

“[Location] is something I’ve been very conscious of with getting them,” Morrison said. “I’m pre-med, and I don’t think that tattoos should make a difference, but I know that in some people’s eyes they do. And with how things are right now, I don’t want to put myself in that position where I can’t get the job I want simply because I have a tattoo.”

Pritchard was the only one who said she did not give much weight to the opinions of future employers when making a decision about where she would have her tattoo.

“It definitely came up, mostly from my dad, but I just don’t want to work anywhere that would not let me have a tattoo,” she said. “It’s just not important to me.” She also noted, however, that visibility in general was one of her considerations.

Many parents had a lot to say on the topic of tattoos. Pritchard and her mother got theirs together, and, though her father was unhappy about it, the fact that it was a family affair “sort of made him shut his mouth,” she said.

Burr told her younger brother but not her parents after she got inked. Burr recalled how they found out while out to dinner during the winter break after she got her tattoo: Her father remarked on the prominent arm tattoos of their waitress and turned to ask Burr, “‘Do you have any tattoos?’”

“I thought my little brother had snitched on me, and so I was like, ‘Yes.’” And he hadn’t. So that’s when it came out,” she said. “My parents were actually even a lot cooler about it than I thought they would be.”

Crawford also did not expect his family to be happy about his tattoo, and he was right.

“My parents hated it. They hated it a lot,” Crawford said. “My grandparents hate it — my grandparents have never acknowledged it. They’ve never asked me what it meant, but they know I have it. My sister’s not very happy with it, but she laughs a little more than my parents, obviously.”

Morrison’s father, who has many of his own tattoos, OK-ed his decision to get his first tattoo. His mother was a little hesitant when he first brought up the idea of a tattoo, he said, but recently also got her own first tattoo.

“The first thing she said after she was done was, ‘This will not be my only one,’ ” he said. “They’re definitely addicting.”

Jarecki’s mother fully endorsed his decision, supporting him during the painful process of getting the tattoo inked on the thin skin of his foot, and even paid the bill, he said.

“I was holding my mom’s hand the whole time while she was videotaping it,” he said. “It seems like a lot of people get tattoos, and part of it is kind of like a rebellion against their parents or like a counter-cultural move, and I really didn’t feel that way about what I was doing. It was important for me that my parents understand the reasons why I wanted to have it.”

In general, there seems to be a generational gap in reactions to these five students’ tattoos. All of them said that their peers thought their tattoos were cool. A 2010 Pew Research report noted that nearly 40 percent of Millennials have at least one tattoo. The report defines Millennials as “the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium.”

“In the generations above us, there’s generally a trend of a bit of prejudice against people, especially with a lot of tattoos, so I did consider that when I was thinking about how easy do I want this to be to cover up,” Burr said.

Morrison agreed that there was a generational shift and noted that the general consensus on tattoos has changed as they become more prevalent.

“In the society that we live in now, it’s not really a big deal to have a tattoo anymore; it’s become much more acceptable just because so many people have them,” he said. “People don’t really care that much, and I don’t think people should care that much, because it’s literally just a part of their body.”

All five students said that their tattoos have meaning for them that goes beyond decoration or art. They recognized that significant personal value is not a priority for everyone who gets a tattoo, but they felt it was an important part of their own decisions.

“It is very much a personal thing, and I know people do tattoos for the sake of body art, which is definitely fine, but for me, I just kind of want it to be about something related to my family,” Pritchard said.

“Tattoos are cool because you can say something that you want about yourself. But I feel like it’s one of those things that, for me, I would never get something that I hadn’t thought really long and hard about,” Burr said.

Morrison, on the other hand, disagrees with the notion that tattoos must always have significance.

“Part of the reason I get tattoos is for the meaning, obviously. But then the other part is that I get to change my body in the way I want; I get to make my own body look a certain way,” he said. “Even if there isn’t a story behind it, it still means something. I just don’t think that it has to have the meaning so many people believe it needs to have.”

“I think they can just have an aesthetic value,” Crawford said. “I kind of look at skin as a blank canvas — you could put something on it or not; both have their own beauty to it. Personally I don’t think they need that kind of value, but I think it helps you to be happier with it long term … For me, it’s like I need something that kind of gives it a little more weight.”

Some of the students said they have thought about how their tattoos will look as they get older. Most have received only positive feedback on their tattoos, but Morrison has had the question raised to him by other people.

“[People] ask me, ‘Do you think you’ll regret it?’ And I hate that question more than anything. The obvious answer is ‘Would I have gotten it if I think I was going to regret it? Obviously not,’ ” he said.

That is not to say that Morrison has not thought about where he — and his tattoo — will be a few decades down the line. He acknowledges that it is possible one day he will not love his tattoos as much as he does now.

“But that’s not even the point, though,” he said. “The point is even when I’m old and I’m like, ‘I don’t really like this tattoo anymore,’ there’s still something behind it. At one point it was exactly what I wanted, so it’s still a part of me. So I don’t think I could ever regret it. Even if I dislike it, I don’t think I would regret it.”