I am a 19-year-old college student.

I don’t do drugs.

I don’t party.

I don’t cheat, steal, or commit crimes.

I am a very family-oriented person.

I get good grades.

I have friends.

However, I do have tattoos.

I have two tattoos, one on each arm. One is a semicolon, and the other is a quote from a song. This song is a lullaby that my recently late grandmother used to sing to me and my cousins throughout the years.

I got the semicolon in January 2017, a few months after I turned 18. I got the song lyric exactly a year later in January 2018.

My grandmother died in September 2017 and it rocked my family to their cores. The whole family spent a whole week caring for my grandmother in her final days and it was an emotional experience for all of us.

She had Parkinson’s disease that later turned into Dementia, and eventually, she didn’t know how to do anything anymore. My grandparents moved back home so we could help take care of her.

I got the lyric tattooed on my body as a way of honoring one of the best and most genuine women I have ever met.

Tattoos seem to have a stigma in today's society. It is way less stigmatized than it was in the past, but it seems that a lot of people still cannot get past their own biases to see the beauty that tattoos hold.

I am more than just my tattoos.

I see tattoos and things like piercings and hairstyles as ways of modifying your body to express yourself. We are all born with what we are born with; there is nothing we can do to change what we were given. What we can change is how we make what we are given our own.

Everyone has their own hairstyle and their own fashion sense. Likewise, tattoos and piercings help us express ourselves. They tell our interests and tell stories about ourselves.

Tattoos are beautiful.

Tattoos don’t necessarily give off the vibe of a criminal or a bad person. They don’t always make you look tough and scary.

They are not unprofessional in the workplace unless, of course, there is profanity in it or there is an inappropriate connotation to it. There is no reason why a person who is interviewing for a job and has tattoos should be turned away for the way they look. Workplaces should not be judging your workability by your skin.

Depending on where you get your tattoos, they may distort with age. The same thing can be said about any part of your body. It just doesn't look the same as it did years before.

People get old and they start to wrinkle. SO WHAT!

My tattoo is not on my body for any other reason than I wanted it. I don’t care that it won't look the same in 20 to 40 years from now because I know why it's there and what it means to me.

I know what it stands for in my own mind.

My tattoos don’t define me as a person and I'm not covering them up for anyone. I am still the same exact person I was before I got them.

I am still just as dedicated, just as smart, and just as hardworking as someone who doesn’t have tattoos.

Tattoos are amazing. Don’t let any closeminded or old-fashioned people tell you they aren’t.