The Inkery in Downtown London
Alterations to your body can be temporary like haircuts, hair colour changes and a beard. But alterations like tattoos are permanent, and some have deeper meanings than just ink in your skin. They hold significant value to the person that shows them off.
Becca MacDougall is PSW who has a handful of tattoos scattered over her, but some of them have meaningful stories that are attached to them. “The one that has the most meaning, to me are separate tattoos. Basically, I have a one of my favorite bands ever. They’re called La Dispute, and I have a really big connection to them. And so I got this tattoo, and it’s sort of it symbolizes a broken jar, which is a song they wrote. And I really resonated with me. The jar kind of represents myself as like, you know, me and my identity and things like that. And then inside of it, there’s a ship and a storm and the idea is that the ship is myself, my mental health and the storm is going the opposite way of the ship kind of like representing that, yes, there is turmoil, but I’m still going the opposite way. Like I’m just trying to like, focus on moving forward instead of focusing on the time when there’s like a huge storm.”
Having tattoos that mean something to the individual makes for great stories, and it can mean something to the individual who gets to tell the story time and time again. “I just really wanted something that obviously would like look cool and like stay, you know, appropriate and cool forever. Because like, first of all, my job was really important to me. And it’s not a kind of job that I can kind of have like, willy-nilly tattoos and things like that. And that’s not something I’m really interested in anyway. It was just more like I wanted something on me to represent what I had been through because at that time, I had been through like, quite a big change in my life. There was a lot of familial issues and things like that that were going on. And I kind of just felt like, if there was something that I could really hold on to would be the fact that despite everything that had happened, my mental health persevered through that and with that, so did me and my life.”
Some of those stories can be good, some them can be bad, or the stories can change depending on the time. Becca has a couple tattoos whose stories changed throughout the years, but she doesn’t have any regrets. “No, I don’t have any regrets at all. I even have tattoos that I think some people would regret. There’s tattoos that I have dedicated to people who I don’t speak to anymore, things like that. But I always try to think like, even though the memory I now have of them isn’t pleasant, the memory I had of the while I was getting that tattoo, it was good. And I think it’s important to think that way with tattoos because they’re permanent, and it’s very expensive and painful to have them removed. So I think yeah, just I think it’s a good idea to just try to focus on the fact that you don’t have to regret it if you don’t want to and I don’t.”
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