Going in for a tattoo can be a nerve-wracking experience. You're about to permanently put ink on your body. You're about to go through pain. If you've never done it before, you're probably even more nervous.
And then the tattoo is over. You've gone through the pain, the cringing, maybe even held someone's hand through it all, and now you have a permanent piece of art. It's amazing. You snap a picture, go home, and upload it to your social media.
You're feeling real proud of yourself, excited to finally memorialize that thing you love, until someone comments and says, "haha, real original." Your heart sinks. Yeah, you're not the first person on the planet to get this tattoo, but so what?
You've seen them. The clickbait articles with titles like "15 of the Most Common Tattoos," or "Tattoos Everyone Got This Year," with pictures of infinity signs on some white girls.
Why are we so obsessed with putting people down for "unoriginal" tattoos? If you don't want it, then don't get it. I'll be the first to admit that I have a few tattoos that I've seen on others. But I never saw that as a bad thing.
People have been getting the same thing for centuries. Back in the sailor days, men would climb off the boats, walk into a tattoo shop, and pick out something badass off of a flash sheet. There was no internet to mock their anchors or pinup girls. No one in their right minds would have walked up to one of these American traditional covered guys and told them that they already met a hundred other guys with those tattoos.
In fact, these sort of tattoos are making an extreme come-back. I myself have several American traditional tattoos on my body and know many artists who only do this style of tattoos. I've never had a single person say that my American traditional tattoos were unoriginal, while I've had multiple people tell me that my semi-colon is lame for being something that everyone else has.
In fact, I got my semi-colon at a shop that was doing a fundraiser for Project Semi-Colon, where they tattooed them all day long. It doesn't matter to those against my tattoo that it represented my struggle with depression and suicide, or that the money I spent on it went to a fundraiser, it gets mocked for being common.
Why are we doing this? Why make fun of tattoos that we feel aren't original? Most of the time, these tattoos are on people who find actual meaning by their ink. Perhaps it is a sexism thing- you can easily mock a 20-something woman because her tattoos are seen as vain and vapid, but a man with tattoos is seen as tough and strong. Despite the fact that men have common tattoos as well-have you ever met a guy who has his last name tattooed across his shoulder blades? Or with Roman numerals on his arm?
Or perhaps it's because tattoos are more common. 36 percent of Millennials have tattoos, and 40 percent of Gen X have tattoos. Everyone either has a tattoo, has multiple tattoos, or is friends with someone who falls in the previous categories. In a world where everything has been done before, people are suddenly obsessed with being original, more specifically, others' originality. Newsflash, tattoos were never original.
Any tattoo you'll get, someone will likely have something similar. Guess what? That's OK. Tattoos are meant to tell a story, not separate you from everyone else. Instead of spitting on each other for having tattoos that aren't "original," let's lift each other up for our tattoos that mean so much to us.
