By Nikki Dabney
Prison inmates, sailors and drug addicts are no longer the only ones with tattoos. In a higher learning environment like SMU, many students and faculty members choose to get tattoos as an expression of their identities.
To this community, tattoos are more than body doodles; they express the deepest parts of the people who get them. Karen Click, the director of SMU’s Women & LGBT Center, has about 20 tattoos (she has lost count). The first tattoo Click got was her name in Tai: Pailin. In high school, she was an exchange student in Thailand and returned to teach English there later in life, so Thailand is a special place to her.
Click has two completely different lives when she lives in Thailand and when she lives in the U.S. For instance, in Thailand, she bows to gender expectations and women inferiority. In the U.S., she is a strong feminist and acts as an equal to others.
“They are both my life,” Click said. “I put [my tattoo] at my wrist because that’s where you take your pulse. It’s like you’re feeling yourself. I’m not just feeling Karen, but I’m feeling Pailin too.”
Even tattoos that may not hold as deep of a message still represent the person in some way. Sophomore Kate Moody has a tattoo of Texas on her butt. It has a star marking the location of the camp she and her two best friends grew up going to together. One Sunday during their senior year of high school, the girls went to church together and then went straight to the tattoo parlor.
“My tattoo is funny, and I like to think I have a good sense of humor,” Moody said. “It reflects the person I am.”
For junior Allison Johnson, her tattoos represent the period of her life she spent serving in the military when she was 18-22 years old. From her hip to her knee, she has a tattoo of an anchor with a rose attached to a rope that’s tied around a crow flying away, and the rope is severed. She got the tattoo the day she left the military.
“Everyone gets anchor tattoos to celebrate the military, but I got it as my release from all that and leaving that life behind,” Johnson said.
Johnson also has a tattoo that says, “self-efficacy” on her shoulder. When her life got really difficult in the military, she participated in an outpatient mental health program where they focused on self-efficacy– the belief that people can accomplish something for themselves. The physical process of getting her tattoos was a therapeutic process for Johnson.
“I had to take what I went through and sit through the six hour process and think about how that feels and confront my pain,” Johnson said.
Although culture is more accepting of tattoos, people with them still feel they are perceived in a certain way.
“By my choices, I have ruled out corporate life,” Click said. “I like these tattoos enough to sacrifice what’s going to come my way. They mean more to me than other things.”
Johnson realized how people view her and her tattoos during her first job out of the military. She was a nanny for a Pakistani family in Highland Park. The mother of the family said if her neighbors saw Johnson walking into the house they would probably call the police.
“I realized what I put out there physically is not the energy I think I put out there,” Johnson said.
Johnson wonders what professors think of her. She worries they assume she doesn’t take school seriously.
“I just have to make sure my actions speak louder than my arms,” Johnson said.
Tattoos do not define people. They become part of an existing identity. They become so ingrained in people that they often forget they even have tattoos.
“I basically forget that they’re there,” Johnson said. “It’s just my skin.”
Having tattoos is deeply personal and individualistic, but the individual also becomes part of the larger tattoo community.
“I’ll go up to a stranger in a museum and say, ‘You have a beautiful tattoo,’ and we’ll talk for hours,” Click said. “It brings up conversations with people I normally never would have associated with.”
Tattoos are permanent. They are a continual process of therapy. They are a permanent reminder of memories and source of motivation. They are a permanent source of self-expression and connection with others.
“It puts who I am out there without me having to try,” Johnson said. “Rather than me being someone who went through all of those things that I did and then walking around as if none of it happened, I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve.”
