For four years, I planned on getting the tattoo I have. The rule I was given by my parents was, "No tattoos if I lived under their roof." So I saved up just enough, and held onto it until I moved to Orlando for school back at the beginning of fall term, 2015. I waited a few weeks until I was settled into my apartment (which I would only stay in for about two months before moving to a different one due to bitchy roommates), then dragged an acquaintance of mine to City Walk, and got it done at the Hart and Huntington.
Most people see my tattoo and assume I'm a medical major. They see the winged staff with two snakes and associate it with medicine. People don't realize that for mythology nuts, it takes on a whole new meaning. In Greek mythology, the staff originally belonged to Apollo, god of music, the sun, and yes, medicine. However, it's said in most stories that the god Hermes then tricked Apollo into trading the staff for a lyre he made from the cow guts. This successfully earned him the staff, and caused Apollo to forget that Hermes just stole a herd of cows from him, slaughtered them, and turned them into a musical instrument. That said, the staff would belong to Hermes, the messenger god, who is also the god of travel, thieves, trickery, and business. Hermes has nothing to do with medicine. It could also be that people are confusing the staff with the staff of Aesculapius, son of Apollo, and god of doctors. His staff has only one snake.
So, there's the majority who see the staff as a sign of health, the myth-nuts, who know that it actually belongs to Apollo, and then me. I have an entirely different way of looking at my tattoo, which stems not from the picture, but the words. "Hermes, Cabin 11." I’m obsessed with the Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus series. There is a reason for that, and it's not just because the I think the series is amazing (which it is).
It started towards the end of third grade. I don't remember why, but I had completely lost all interest in reading and writing. I only read or wrote anything when I had to for an assignment. Come sixth grade, a friend of mine (who sadly became a bitch when we got to high school) was obsessed with the Percy Jackson book series, and kept trying to get everyone she knew to read it. I would always decline. I had no interest in reading anything, and here my friend was trying to tell me to read five, full-length novels.
Come eighth grade, I went to see the movie with a large group of people. It was.... okay. I was more interested in the conversation we had afterward about godly parents. We were going around deciding godly parents for each person who was there, and when it got to me the group unanimously agreed on Hermes. I was confused by this, because the main Hermes child that showed up in the movie was the villain. Why would I be like him? It was then explained to me that (spoiler alert) Luke wasn't actually evil in the full series. They then proceeded to explain all of the things the movie got wrong, including what Hermes was the god of. So I retorted by saying that if he was the god of thieves, he wouldn't be my parent. I'm not a thief. It was then brought to my attention that I had a bad habit of taking little bits of food from my friends’ lunches while their backs are turned. My friend Lucy added that over the years she had loaned my what accumulated to about 60 bucks, and she knew I would probably never pay her back, to which I responded with, "Okay, fair enough."
Finally, I realized I had to know what they were talking about, so I borrowed the books from my friend who had been begging me to read them. It was that series, that got me to read again. It inspired me to write again. (And it made me so angry with the movies I wanted to hire a professional tracker to find the director, just so I could punch him in the face.) Before those books, I wanted nothing to do with literature, and now I'm a writing major who writes short stories for fun. Those books flipped my life around, and brought me where I am today.
So my tattoo isn't of the sign for medical health, and it's not just about Hermes' staff either. It is where my roots are, where my path began. Before I was a writing and rhetoric major, before I was a short story author, or an aspiring advertising copywriter; I was a daughter of Hermes at Camp Half-Blood, cabin 11. So thank you Rick Riordan (though I doubt you’ll ever actually see this). Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me, and all of your other fans.
