They tell me I'll come to regret the ink that I adorn my body with,

that I'm too young to decide on something so permanent

as they hand me applications for college so that I can decide the career

I will hold for the rest of my life.

They tell me that my skin is no longer beautiful because it is dirtied,

and etched up with meaningless markings

But my tattoos are not dirt, they are the art that decorates the canvas that is my body.

And they are anything but meaningless, for they tell the story of my being

and even if my story grows and changes, that does not cancel out the past

of the eighteen year old girl who had such a deep love for reading she wanted her passion displayed proudly on her body for as long as she lived.

They tell me that I will change and come to regret and resent the black markings

But even as I pray that I will never lose the passions that seem most important to me now,

if I must at one point in life say goodbye to them, then I will always have the reminder in my life

of happier times of a young girl who burned bright with what she loved.

Of the girl who looked at the moon and found strength and love and beauty

Of the student who was enamored with the sciences and the secrets of the human body.

Yet you say the skull on my arm is frightening and disturbing,

but what is disturbing about your own anatomy

Are we not just brains living inside of a skull in a body?

Is your skull not the home you live in?

You will always find problems with the beauty that lives on my skin

Just as I will always find reasons to decorate my body with the stories of myself

"My body is my journal, and my tattoos are my story" - Johnny Depp