Why did you get a tattoo?

My step father and father died before I turned 15. I was an emotional train wreck, I never had a support system around me. I never had a chance to grieve in way to heal the pain. A tattoo was my attempt to heal. I also adapted work that my step father created and decided that would be my first.

My subsequent ones were in my travels, a replacement for souvenirs. I have tattoos from Antwerp, St. Louis, NYC and LA.

There is also a rush of adrenaline during the process and after that can be addicting.

If you have no interest, I highly recommend not getting one.

I am covered in ink from my ears to my toes. I got a lot of my work done when I was young, addicted to drugs, confused, and would splash whatever garbage I could on my body. Now I spend thousands of dollars fixing these mistakes. Make sure you know why and what you you want and if you aren't fully committed, don't. Good art costs, and good artists you wait to get into. Yes there are the rare exception but generally look for reputable shops, go through their artists catalogs and choose an artists who has a style you really like. Example: Don't take a realistic portrait piece to an artist who doesn't do portraits.

Well, the short answer is that I wanted to look cool.

The long answer is that "looking cool" is a social signaling mechanism. I now attract friendly strangers who recognize the specific symbols on my skin.

For a fixed cost, I have forever increased the chance of meeting people with common interests and actually realizing that we have common interests.

The downside, of course, is that some friendly strangers (and employers) may avoid me because of my tattoos.

I think, so far, that it's been a net positive experience for me. I'll likely get more when I have more expendable time and income.

I have two tattoos. One I got for complicated emotional reasons (I'd say as a commemoration, but that implies a celebratory aspect that it doesn't have).

The other I got as part of a worldwide art project.

I also have ~no interest in getting a tattoo, at best curiosity ambivavent. It might be a lingering sense of perfectionism preventing me from choosing a specific thing, which is why if I ever go for it I'll ask a close friend to do a stick-and-poke of whatever they choose, like how a blank page can be intimidating so just make a squiggle and off you go.

That would be a meaningful marker of place, time, and relationship to me.

For many years I sought creative expression in every part of my life. Tattoo ink was just another way to decorate my body, not really different from all the other fashion-related things I've done with clothes and jewelry and makeup and hairstyles and dye and piercings and so forth.

I have known people who like to get tattoos because the experience of being tattooed does something for them in itself, but for me it was all about the art I wanted to wear. I didn't mind the pain, but it wasn't about that. There is some symbolic significance, which I mostly keep to myself, but mostly it's just that I like the way it looks.

Because they are fucking cool.

1. I don't like needles.

2. I would have a hard time deciding what to get since it was permanent.

3. Negative reaction to the ink.

4. Negative criticism.